Abstract
We simulate scattering delays from the interstellar medium to examine the
effectiveness of three estimators in recovering these delays in pulsar timing
data. Two of these estimators use the more traditional process of fitting
autocorrelation functions to pulsar dynamic spectra to extract scintillation
bandwidths, while the third estimator uses the newer technique of cyclic
spectroscopy on baseband pulsar data to to recover the interstellar medium's
impulse response function. We find that either fitting a Lorentzian or Gaussian
distribution to an autocorrelation function or recovering the impulse response
function from the cyclic spectrum are, on average, accurate in recovering
scattering delays, although autocorrelation function estimators have a large
variance, even at high S/N. We find that, given sufficient S/N, cyclic
spectroscopy is more accurate than both Gaussian and Lorentzian fitting for
recovering scattering delays at specific epochs, suggesting that cyclic
spectroscopy is a superior method for scattering estimation in high quality
data.