Timing, polarimetry and physics of the bright, nearby millisecond pulsar PSR J0437-4715 - a single-pulse perspective

Single pulses from radio pulsars contain a wealth of information about emission and propagation in the magnetosphere and insight into their timing properties. It was recently demonstrated that single-pulse emission is responsible for limiting the timing stability of the brightest of millisecond pulsars. We report on an analysis of more than a million single pulses from PSR J0437-4715 and present various statistical properties such as the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) distribution, timing and polarimetry of average profiles integrated from sub-pulses with chosen S/N cut-offs, modulation properties of the emission, phase-resolved statistics of the S/N and two-dimensional spherical histograms of the polarization vector orientation. The last of these indicates the presence of orthogonally polarized modes (OPMs). Combined with the dependence of the polarization fraction on the S/N and polarimetry of the brightest pulses, the existence of OPMs constrains pulsar emission mechanisms and models for the plasma physics in the magnetosphere.