Giant pulses from PSR B0540-69 in the Large Magellanic Cloud

We report the discovery of the first giant pulses from an extragalactic radio pulsar. Observations of PSR B0540-69 in the Large Magellanic Cloud made with the Parkes radio telescope at 1.38 GHz show single pulses with energy more than 5000 times that of the average pulse energy. This is only the second young pulsar, after the Crab, to show giant pulse emission. Similar to the Crab pulsar, the giant pulses occur in two distinct phase ranges and have significant arrival time jitter within these ranges. The location of the giant pulses appears to lag the peak of the (sinusoidal) X-ray profile by 0.37 and 0.64 phase, although absolute timing between the radio and X-ray data is not yet secure. The dispersion measure of the giant pulses is 146.5 cm(-3) pc, in agreement with the detection of the pulsar at 0.64 GHz by Manchester et al. The giant pulses are scatter broadened at 1.4 GHz with an exponential scattering time of 0.4 ms and have an emission bandwidth of at least 256 MHz. In 8 hr of integration, we have failed to detect any integrated flux density from the pulsar to a level of 13 muJy, assuming a duty cycle of 10%. This implies that the spectral index between 0.64 and 1.38 GHz is steeper than -4.4.