The Parkes multibeam pulsar survey: Preliminary results

A high-frequency survey of the Galactic plane for radio pulsars is inprogress, using the multibeam receiver on the 64-m Parkes radiotelescope. Wedescribe the survey motivations, the observing plan and the inital results. Thesurvey is discovering many pulsars, more than 500 so far. Eight of the newpulsars are binary, one with a massive companion. At least eight are young,with characteristic ages of less than 100 kyr. Two of these (Kaspi et al, thisConference) have surface dipole magnetic field strengths greater than any otherknown radio pulsar.