Eight new radio pulsars in the Large Magellanic Cloud

We present the discovery of eight new radio pulsars located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Five of these pulsars were found from reprocessing the Parkes Multibeam Survey of the Magellanic Clouds, while the remaining three were from an ongoing new survey at Parkes with a high-resolution data acquisition system. It is possible that these pulsars were missed in the earlier processing due to radio frequency interference, visual judgment or the large number of candidates that must be analysed. One of these new pulsars has a dispersion measure of 273 pc cm^-3, almost twice the highest previously known value, making it possibly the most distant LMC pulsar. In addition, we present the null result of a radio pulse search of an X-ray point source located in SNR J0047.2-7308 in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). Although no millisecond pulsars have been found, these discoveries have increased the known rotation-powered pulsar population in the LMC by more than 50 per cent. Using the current sample of LMC pulsars, we used a Bayesian analysis to constrain the number of potentially observable pulsars in the LMC to within a 95 per cent credible interval of 57 000⁺⁷⁰⁰⁰⁰_-30000. The new survey at Parkes is ∼20 per cent complete, and it is expected to yield at most six millisecond pulsars in the LMC and SMC. Although it is very sensitive to short period pulsars, this new survey provides only a marginal increase in sensitivity to long periods. The limiting luminosity for this survey is 125 mJy kpc² for the LMC which covers the upper 10 per cent of all known radio pulsars. The luminosity function for normal pulsars in the LMC is consistent with their counterparts in the Galactic disc. The maximum 1400 MHz radio luminosity for LMC pulsars is ∼1000 mJy kpc².