A search for submillisecond pulsars

We have conducted a search of 19 southern Galactic globular clusters for submillisecond pulsars at 660 MHz with the Parkes 64 m radio telescope. To minimize dispersion smearing we used the CPSR baseband recorder, which samples the 20 MHz observing band at the Nyquist rate. By possessing a complete description of the signal we could synthesize an optimal filter bank in software, and in the case of globular clusters of known dispersion measure, much of the dispersion could be removed using coherent techniques. This allowed for very high time resolution (25.6 μs in most cases), making our searches in general sensitive to submillisecond pulsars with flux densities greater than about 3 mJy at 50 cm. No new pulsars were discovered, placing important constraints on the proportion of pulsars with very short spin periods in these clusters.