Radio Pulse Properties of the Millisecond Pulsar PSR J0437-4715. I. Observations at 20cm

We present a total of 48 minutes of observations of the nearby, bright millisecond pulsar PSR J0437-4715 taken at the Parkes radio observatory in Australia. The data were obtained at a central radio frequency of 1380 MHz using a high-speed tape recorder that permitted coherent Nyquist sampling of 50 MHz of bandwidth in each of two polarizations. Using the high time resolution available from this voltage recording technique, we have studied a variety of single-pulse properties, most for the first time in a millisecond pulsar. We find no evidence for "diffractive" quantization effects in the individual pulse arrival times or amplitudes as have been reported for this pulsar at lower radio frequency using coarser time resolution (Ables et al. 1997). Overall, we find that the single pulse properties of PSR J0437-4715 are similar to those of the common slow-rotating pulsars, even though this pulsar's magnetosphere and surface magnetic field are several orders of magnitude smaller than those of the general population. The pulsar radio emission mechanism must therefore be insensitive to these fundamental neutron star properties.