Practical application of cyclic spectroscopy to pulsar signals

Precision pulsar timing observations are subject to many effects from the interstellar medium (ISM) which corrupt the signal and reduce the achievable timing precision. The largest effect, dispersion, is now routinely corrected for using the technique of coherent dedispersion, where a digital filter is used to invert the linear transfer function of the interstellar medium. Inhomogeneities in the ISM give rise to more subtle corruption in the form of scattering and scintillation. Much research has been done to study and characterize these effects with the hope of mitigating them. These effects span a wide range of time and frequency scales. The trade off between time and frequency resolution inherent in traditional spectral analysis reduces the amount of information about the perturbations which can be obtained using this method.