New Timing Solutions for Rotating Radio Transients

Rotating radio transients (RRATs) are sporadic pulsars which have a wide range of emission properties. They can be loosely defined as objects that were discovered only through their single pulses. For most of these RRATs, the timing of these individual pulses is the most reliable method to measure their periods and determine timing solutions, while some of them that are less sporadic can be timed by using folding techniques as we do for normal pulsars. Here, based on Parkes and Green Bank Telescope (GBT) observations, we introduce our results on eight RRATs including their precise rotation parameters, positions, and dispersion measures (DMs), along with a series of studies on RRAT properties. By analyzing data for all RRATs with timing solutions, we find that the period derivatives of RRATsn are likely to be larger than that of normal pulsars. We also carry out Lomb-Scargle tests for the eight RRATs to search for periodicities in their pulse arrival times on long timescales, and significant periodicities are detected for all of them. Analyzing the single pulse amplitudes, the log-normal distributions provide the best fits, which imply that RRAT pulses represent the tail of an intensity distribution for normal pulsars.