Giant pulses from the Crab pulsar: A wide-band study
  The Crab pulsar is well-known for its anomalous giant radio pulse emission.
Past studies have concentrated only on the very bright pulses or were
insensitive to the faint end of the giant pulse luminosity distribution. With
our new instrumentation offering a large bandwidth and high time resolution
combined with the narrow radio beam of the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope
(WSRT), we seek to probe the weak giant pulse emission regime. The WSRT was
used in a phased array mode, resolving a large fraction of the Crab nebula. The
resulting pulsar signal was recorded using the PuMa II pulsar backend and then
coherently dedispersed and searched for giant pulse emission. After careful
flux calibration, the data were analysed to study the giant pulse properties.
The analysis includes the distributions of the measured pulse widths,
intensities, energies, and scattering times. The weak giant pulses are shown to
form a separate part of the intensity distribution. The large number of giant
pulses detected were used to analyse scattering and scintillation in giant
pulses. We report for the first time the detection of giant pulse emission at
both the main- and interpulse phases within a single rotation period. The rate
of detection is consistent with the appearance of pulses at either pulse phase
as being independent. These pulse pairs were used to examine the scintillation
timescales within a single pulse period.
