Chapter 6

Pulsar searching is conceptually a simple process -- the detection of dispersed pulses in noisy data. The first pulsars were discovered serendipitously by visual inspection of the total power output from a radio telescope (Hewish et al. 1968). However, only a small fraction of the 1700 pulsars currently known are strong enough to be discovered via their individual pulses. The vast majority of known pulsars, and most that still await discovery, are faint objects which require sensitive telescopes and innovative techniques to reveal their periodic nature. From the discussion in Chapters 1 and 2, the motivation for probing deeper into this population is to discover exotic pulsars (e.g. those in binary systems) and to better characterise the Galactic distribution and evolution of neutron stars.