Pulsars are fast-spinning, magnetized neutron stars, resulting from the explosion of massive stars, that emit pulses of radiation in a periodic, and extremely regular fashion. Thanks to their "ticking", pulsars can be treated as very precise astrophysical clocks that, depending on their characteristics, can be exploited for a plethora of scientific applications.

Discovering more and more pulsars is therefore important not only to better understand the properties of the whole Galactic pulsar population, but also to find peculiar objects that could possibly enable new types of experiments.

Despite the periodic nature of their signals, searching for pulsars can be challenging, especially when they are part of binary systems (which are also the most scientifically valuable sources). Over the decades, a number of methods and algorithms have been developed to target pulsars and systems with different characteristics.

Not all of these algorithms are computationally efficient, therefore they cannot be easily used on all-sky surveys: they can, however, be applied to small data sets, such as those of targeted surveys.

In this colloquium, I will report on the state of the art of radio pulsar searching algorithms. I will particularly focus on a specific algorithm tailored to find the most compact binary pulsars, on which I am working to improve its efficiency so as to make it suitable for large-scale surveys.

Finally, I will report on the results that I obtained by applying these algorithms to real data of globular and open clusters, taken with the Parkes and the MeerKAT radio telescopes.

Brief CV of Viviana Piga:

She obtained her degree in Mathematics in 2019 with a thesis on the study of biharmonic curves on a surface. She then obtained a scholarship at INAF-OAC, where she worked on the development of distributed computational algorithms for the "Citizen COmputing Pulsar Search" (CICLOPS) project. Viviana is currently a PhD student in Mathematics at the University of Cagliari, jointly working with INAF-OAC on improving and applying pulsar searching algorithms to radio astronomical data, with a particular focus on observations of southern globular and open clusters.