Searching for millisecond and slow pulsars with CHIME

Born in core-collapse supernovae, pulsars are highly-magnetized, spinning neutron stars, which emit highly directional electromagnetic radiation in beams above their magnetic poles. This produces a lighthouse effect: we see a pulse of radiation as the beam crosses our line-of-sight, repeating with each rotation of the neutron star. These periodic pulses can reveal a wealth of information about the neutron star, its environment, material the signal encounters on its way to Earth, and even the behaviour of spacetime. Many mysteries remain about these objects and, thus far, we have only discovered a small fraction of them. New surveys to discover more pulsars, therefore, have great scientific potential. In this thesis I use the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) telescope to perform two distinct pulsar surveys on the same small patch of sky. These serve as pilots for larger-scale surveys over the entire CHIME-visible sky. The CHIME All-sky Multi-day Pulsar Stack Search (CHAMPSS) survey uses the data stream from the CHIME/FRB instrument, taking data from the whole Northern sky as it passes overhead and combining data from multiple days to detect fainter pulsars. However, it is not sensitive to the fastest pulsars with periods below ~10ms. The other survey uses the CHIME/Pulsar system to take multiple observations of the same point on the sky, correcting for different amounts of material between the Earth and potential pulsars. This scheme lets it detect the fastest pulsars further out into the Galaxy. However, the CHIME/Pulsar survey does not combine multiple days' data and so will not detect the faintest pulsars found by CHAMPSS. The two surveys are thus sensitive to different, but overlapping, sections of the pulsar population, and further demonstrate the collaborative nature of CHIME which allows multiple experiments to run simultaneously. In this thesis I describe the software pipeline for each survey. The CHAMPSS pipeline I developed as part of a group; the CHIME/Pulsar pipeline was an individual project. I also present PSR J2108+5001, a newly discovered pulsar in the pilot survey area, and J1629+4636, J2100+4711, J2151+5128, and J2319+4919 which were discovered during a subsequent CHAMPSS commissioning survey.