The Perseus Arm Pulsar Survey

The Perseus Arm Pulsar Survey covers the region of the sky enclosed by Galactic longitudes 200° < l < 260° and Galactic latitudes |b| < 5°. It has been designed to be the continuation towards longitudes further from the Galactic Centre of the very successful Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey (PMPS) with the aim of finding interesting individual pulsars for follow-up observations, and better understanding the radial distribution of the pulsar population in the outer Galaxy. As for the PMPS, the observations have been performed using the 21-cm multibeam receiver on the Parkes 64-m radio telescope, the only difference on the set-up being the sampling time, halved to 125 μs. A total of 913 pointings, each of duration 2100 s, were collected. The system provided a limiting flux density, for long-period pulsars with 5 per cent duty cycle, of ∼0.22 mJy. Data analysis resulted in the detection of 32 pulsars of which 14 were new discoveries. One of these, J0721−2038, has a period of 15.5 ms and is in a binary orbit with a period of 5.5 d around an intermediate-mass (>0.46 M) companion. We present timing parameters, obtained with the Parkes and Lovell telescopes for all new pulsars and update the results of the pulsar population studies in light of the new discoveries. Our knowledge of the radial density function of pulsars continues to be dominated by uncertainties in the Galactic distribution of free electrons.