Characterizing Pulsars Detected in the Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey

Abstract: We present the detection of 661 known pulsars observed with the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope at 888 MHz as a part of the Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS). Detections were made through astrometric coincidence and we estimate the false alarm rate of our sample to be ~0.5%. Using archival data at 400 and 1400 MHz, we estimate the power law spectral indices for the pulsars in our sample and find that the mean spectral index is -1.78 +/- 0.6. However, we also find that a single power law is inadequate to model all the observed spectra. With the addition of the flux densities between 150 MHz and 3 GHz from various imaging surveys, we find that up to 40% of our sample shows deviations from a simple power law model. Using Stokes V measurements from the RACS data, we measured the circular polarization fraction for 9% of our sample and find that the mean polarization fraction is ~10% (consistent between detections and upper limits). Using the dispersion measure (DM) derived distance we estimate the pseudo luminosity of the pulsars and do not find any strong evidence for a correlation with the pulsars' intrinsic properties.