Abstract

High-quality X-ray pulsar observation profiles are vital for investigating both their physical properties and navigation applications. Conventional profile extraction relies on epoch folding, whose performance is constrained by observation duration and bin size, often leading to poor-quality profiles or even failure under extremely low-photon conditions. This paper proposes a novel method that directly extracts high-quality profile frequency spectra merely by statistical analysis of photon sequences followed by the reconstruction of time domain waveforms. Monte Carlo simulations and real observational data demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits higher correlation coefficients and signal-to-noise ratios than those obtained using traditional epoch folding, and also outperforms the Fourier-series-based frequency cutoff method. Moreover, comparable profile quality can be achieved using an order of magnitude fewer photons than required by epoch folding. The lower the photon count, the more significant the improvement, making the method especially suitable for small-area detectors and resource-constrained observation scenarios.

IPC Classification

Keywords