Making precise measurements of pulsar dispersion measures (DMs) and applying suitable corrections for them is among the major challenges in high-precision timing programs such as pulsar timing arrays (PTAs). While the advent of wideband pulsar instrumentation can enable more precise DM measurements and thence improved timing precision, it also necessitates doing careful assessments of frequency-dependent (chromatic) DMs that were theorized by Cordes et al (2016). Here we report the detection of such an effect in broadband observations of the millisecond pulsar PSR J2241−5236, a high-priority target for current and future PTAs. The observations were made contemporaneously using the wideband receivers and capabilities now available at the Murchison Widefield Array, the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, and the Parkes telescopes, thus providing an unprecedentedly large frequency coverage from 80 MHz to 4 GHz. Our analysis shows the measurable changes in DM that scale with the observing frequency (ν) as δDM ∝ ν 2.5±0.1. We discuss the potential implications of such a frequency dependence in the measured DMs and the likely impact on the timing noise budget and comment on the usefulness of low-frequency observations in advancing PTA efforts.

A new high time resolution observing mode for the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is described, enabling full polarimetric observations with up to 30.72 MHz of bandwidth and a time resolution of 0.8 μs. This mode makes use of a polyphase synthesis filter to "undo" the polyphase analysis filter stage of the standard MWA's Voltage Capture System (VCS) observing mode. Sources of potential error in the reconstruction of the high time resolution data are identified and quantified, with the S/N loss induced by the back-to-back system not exceeding -0.65 dB for typical noise-dominated samples. The system is further verified by observing three pulsars with known structure on microsecond timescales.

One of the major challenges for pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments is the mitigation of the effects of the turbulent interstellar medium (ISM) from timing data. These can potentially lead to measurable delays and/or distortions in the pulse profiles and scale strongly with the inverse of the radio frequency. Low-frequency observations are therefore highly appealing for characterizing them. However, in order to achieve the necessary time resolution to resolve profile features of short-period millisecond pulsars, phase-coherent dedispersion is essential, especially at frequencies below 300 MHz. We present the lowest-frequency (80–220 MHz), coherently dedispersed detections of one of the most promising pulsars for current and future PTAs, PSR J2241–5236, using our new beamformer software for the MWA’s voltage capture system, which reconstructs the time series at a much higher time resolution of ∼1 μs by resynthesizing the recorded voltage data at 10 kHz/100 μs native resolutions. Our data reveal a dual-precursor type feature in the pulse profile that is either faint or absent in high-frequency observations from Parkes. The resultant high-fidelity detections have enabled dispersion measure determinations with very high precision, of the order of (2–6) × 10−6 , owing to the microsecond level timing achievable for this pulsar at the MWA’s low frequencies. This underscores the usefulness of low-frequency observations for probing the ISM toward PTA pulsars and informing optimal observing strategies for PTA experiments.