Anomalous X-ray Pulsars (AXPs) are bright X-ray sources. Few AXPs emit highly pulsed emission in hard X-rays. Using data collected with the Large Area Telescope on board Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, we explored high-energy gamma-ray emission from the brightest AXP, 4U 0142+61. We do not detect any significant emission from the source. Here, we present the upper limits to the persistent and pulsed emission of 4U 0142+61 in the high-energy gamma-ray domain.
Pulsars play a crucial astrophysical role as the highly energetic compact radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray sources. Our previous works show that the radio pulsars found as the pulsing gamma sources by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on the board of the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope have high values of magnetic field near the light cylinder, two-three orders of magnitude stronger comparing with the magnetic fields of radio pulsars: $\log B_{lc}$ (G) are 3.60-3.95 and 1.75. Moreover, their losses of the rotation energy are also three orders higher than the corresponding values for the main group of …
Since its launch in June 2008, the Large Area Telescope (LAT), onboard the \emph{Fermi} Gamma-ray Space Telescope, has greatly added to our understanding of gamma-ray pulsars. Its fine point spread function and large effective area, combined with the time-differencing method, make it the first gamma-ray instrument capable of discovering a new population of gamma-ray pulsars. We will present the recent discovery of the youngest (~4600 yr) radio-quiet gamma-ray pulsar discovered in a blind frequency search so far: PSR J1022-5746, a pulsar associated with an extended TeV source. We also present m…
Forty six gamma-ray pulsars were reported in the First Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) Catalog of Gamma-ray Pulsars. Over forty more have been seen since then. A simple but effective figure-of-merit for gamma-detectability is sqrt(Edot)/d^2, where Edot is the pulsar spindown power and d the distance. We are tracking down the best gamma-ray candidates not yet seen. We present the timing and spectral analysis results of some new high spindown power, nearby gamma-ray pulsars. We also update some population distribution plots in preparation for the 2nd Fermi LAT gamma-ray Pulsar Catalog.
We report on X-ray studies of the gamma-ray pulsar PSR J1418$-$6058 in the Rabbit pulsar wind nebula (PWN) carried out using archival Chandra and XMM-Newton observations. A refined timing analysis performed with the 120-ks XMM-Newton data finds significant ($p\approx10^{-7}$) pulsation at $P\approx110$ ms which is consistent with that measured with the Fermi large area telescope (LAT). In the Chandra image, we find extended emission around the pulsar similar to those seen around other pulsars in young PWNe, which further argues for association between PSR J1418$-$6058 and the Rabbit PWN. The X…
The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope has discovered many gamma-ray pulsars, both as radio-loud objects and radio-quiet or radio-weak pulsars that have been identified through blind period searches. The latter presumably have gamma-ray beams originating from high altitudes in the magnetosphere, resulting in little or no overlap with the radio beam. The exponential cut-off of the emission at high energy also points to a medium- or high-altitude origin of the gamma rays. Population synthesis offers means to study two complementary aspects of the gamma-ray pulsar population: energetics and light cu…
Significant gamma-ray pulsations have been detected from ~40 millisecond pulsars (MSPs) using 3 years of sky-survey data from the Fermi LAT and radio timing solutions from across the globe. We have fit the radio and gamma-ray pulse profiles of these MSPs using geometric versions of slot gap and outer gap gamma-ray emission models and radio cone and core models. For MSPs with radio and gamma-ray peaks aligned in phase we also explore low-altitude slot gap gamma-ray models and caustic radio models. The best-fit parameters provide constraints on the viewing geometries and emission sites. While th…
We compare radio profile widths of young, energetic gamma-ray-detected and non-gamma-ray-detected pulsars. We find that the latter typically have wider radio profiles, with the boundary between the two samples exhibiting a dependence on the rate of rotational energy loss. We also find that within the sample of gamma-ray-detected pulsars, radio profile width is correlated with both the separation of the main gamma-ray peaks and the presence of narrow gamma-ray components. These findings lead us to propose that these pulsars form a single population where the main factors determining gamma ray d…
We report on the results of a recent blind search survey for gamma-ray pulsars in Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) data being carried out on the distributed volunteer computing system, Einstein@Home. The survey has searched for pulsations in 118 unidentified pulsar-like sources, requiring about 10,000 years of CPU core time. In total, this survey has resulted in the discovery of 17 new gamma-ray pulsars, of which 13 are newly reported in this work, and an accompanying paper. These pulsars are all young, isolated pulsars with characteristic ages between 12 kyr and 2 Myr, and spin-down powers be…
The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) has been scanning the gamma-ray sky since 2008. The number of pulsars detected by the LAT now exceeds 200, making them by far the largest class of Galactic gamma-ray emitters. I discuss some of the latest pulsar discoveries made by the LAT, in particular those made since the release of the Pass 8 data.
This catalog summarizes 117 high-confidence > 0.1 GeV gamma-ray pulsar detections using three years of data acquired by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on the Fermi satellite. Half are neutron stars discovered using LAT data, through periodicity searches in gamma-ray and radio data around LAT unassociated source positions. The 117 pulsars are evenly divided into three groups: millisecond pulsars, young radio-loud pulsars, and young radio-quiet pulsars. We characterize the pulse profiles and energy spectra and derive luminosities when distance information exists. Spectral analysis of the off-pea…
2009 has been an extraordinary year for gamma-ray pulsar astronomy and 2010 promises to be equally good. Not only have we registered an extraordinary increase in the number of pulsars detected in gamma rays, but we have also witnessed the birth of new sub-families: first of all, the radio-quiet gamma pulsars and later an ever growing number of millisecond pulsars, a real surprise. We started with a sample of 7 gamma-ray emitting neutron stars (6 radio pulsars and Geminga) and now the Fermi-LAT harvest encompasses 24 "Geminga-like" new gamma-ray pulsars, a dozen millisecond pulsars and about th…
We investigate the radio and gamma-ray beaming properties of normal and millisecond pulsars by selecting two samples from the known populations. The first, Sample G, contains pulsars which are detectable in blind searches of gamma-ray data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope. The second, Sample R, contains pulsars detectable in blind radio searches which have spin-down luminosities Edot > 10^{34} erg/s. We analyse the fraction of the gamma-ray-selected Sample G which have detectable radio pulses and the fraction of the radio-selected Sample R which have detectable gamma-ray pulses. Twenty of o…
I present a review of the main phenomenological properties at high energies related to massive gamma-ray binaries and I discuss some aspects of pulsar models for these objects.
There is a growing new class of young spin-down powered pulsars called GeV-quiet soft gamma-ray pulsar; (1) spectral turnover appears around~10MeV, (2) the X-ray spectra of below 20 keV can be described by power law with photon index around 1.2 and (3) the light curve in X-ray/soft gamma-ray bands shows single broad pulse. Their emission properties are distinct from the normal gamma-ray pulsars, for which the spectral peak in $νF_ν$ appears in GeV energy bands and the X-ray/gamma-ray light curves show sharp and double (or more) peaks. In this paper, we discuss that X-ray/soft gamma-ray emissio…
The Large Area Telescope (LAT) on the Fermi satellite is the first gamma-ray instrument to discover pulsars directly via their gamma-ray emission. Roughly one third of the 117 gamma-ray pulsars detected by the LAT in its first three years were discovered in blind searches of gamma-ray data and most of these are undetectable with current radio telescopes. I review some of the key LAT results and highlight the specific challenges faced in gamma-ray (compared to radio) searches, most of which stem from the long, sparse data sets and the broad, energy-dependent point-spread function (PSF) of the L…
We analyze the model of gamma-ray binaries, consisting of a massive star and a pulsar with ultrarelativistic wind. We consider radiation from energetic particles, accelerated at the pulsar wind termination shock, and feedback of this radiation on the wind through production of secondary electron-positron pairs. We show that the pair feedback limits the Lorentz factor of the pulsar wind and creates a population of very energetic pairs, whose radiation may be responsible for the observed gamma-ray signal.
We have analyzed archival XMM-Newton and Chandra observations of the gamma-ray radio-quiet pulsar J1826-1256 and its pulsar wind nebula. The pulsar spectrum can be described by a power-law model with a photon index $Γ\approx1$. We find that the nebular spectrum softens with increasing distance from the pulsar, implying synchrotron cooling. The empirical interstellar absorption-distance relation gives a distance of $\approx3.5$ kpc to J1826-1256. We also discuss the nebula geometry and association between the pulsar, the very high energy source HESS J1826-130, the supernova remnant candidate G1…
We report on the analysis of 13 gamma-ray pulsars discovered in the Einstein@Home blind search survey using Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) Pass 8 data. The 13 new gamma-ray pulsars were discovered by searching 118 unassociated LAT sources from the third LAT source catalog (3FGL), selected using the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) machine learning algorithm on the basis of their gamma-ray emission properties being suggestive of pulsar magnetospheric emission. The new gamma-ray pulsars have pulse profiles and spectral properties similar to those of previously-detected young gamma-ray pulsars. Fol…
In this review paper we explain the following gamma-ray emission features from the millisecond pulsars. (1)Why is the dipolar field of millisecond pulsars so weak but the magnetic pair creation process may still be able to control the size of the outergap? (2)A sub-GeV pulse component could occur in the vicinity of the radio pulse of millisecond pulsars. (3)Orbital modulated gamma-rays should exist in the black widow systems for large viewing angle.
Most pulsars observed by the Fermi LAT have gamma-ray luminosities scaling with spindown power Edot as L_gamma (Edot x 10^33 erg/s)^{1/2}. However, there exist one detection and several upper limits an order of magnitude or more fainter than this trend. We describe these `sub-luminous' gamma-ray pulsars, and discuss the case for this being an orientation effect. Of the 12 known young radio pulsars with Edot>10^34 erg/s and d<2kpc several are substantially sub-luminous. The limited available geometrical constraints favor aligned geometries for these pulsars, although no one case for alignment i…
In 8 years of operation, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on the Fermi satellite has impacted our understanding of gamma-ray pulsars dramatically. The LAT now sees over two hundred pulsars: the largest class of GeV sources in the Milky Way. They are diverse -- radio loud versus quiet, young versus millisecond, in evolving binary systems versus isolated, and so on. Relatively few of the GeV pulsars have also been seen in soft gamma rays. After an overview, we present 10 new radio pulsars, six young and four recycled, for which we detect gamma-ray pulsations.
Recently, gamma-ray halos of a few degree extension have been detected around two middle-aged pulsars, namely, Geminga and PSR B0656+14, by the High Altitude Water Cherenkov observatory (HAWC). The gamma-ray radiation arise from relativistic electrons that escape the pulsar wind nebula and diffuse in the surrounding medium. The diffusion coefficient is found to be significantly lower than the average value in the Galactic disk. If so, given a typical transverse velocity of $300-500{\,\rm km /s}$ for a pulsar, its displacement could be important in shaping the morphology of its gamma-ray halos.…
The 2nd Fermi-LAT pulsar catalog includes 117 gamma-ray pulsars, of which roughly one third are millisecond pulsars (MSPs) while the remaining two thirds split evenly into young radio-loud and radio-quiet pulsars. Although this large population will enable future, detailed studies of emission mechanisms and the evolution of the underlying neutron star population, some nearly-universal properties are already clear and unequivocal. We discuss some of these aspects below, including the altitude of the gamma-ray emission site and the shape of the gamma-ray spectrum and its implications for the rad…
The AGILE gamma-ray satellite provides large sky exposure levels ($\geq 10^9$ cm$^2$ s per year on the Galactic Plane) with sensitivity peaking at $E\sim$100 MeV where the bulk of pulsar energy output is typically released. Its $\sim$1 $μ$s absolute time tagging capability makes it perfectly suited for the study of gamma-ray pulsars. AGILE collected a large number of gamma-ray photons from EGRET pulsars ($\geq$40,000 pulsed counts for Vela) in two years of observations unveiling new interesting features at sub-millisecond level in the pulsars' high-energy light-curves, gamma-ray emission from …
We present a statistical analysis of the X-ray luminosity of rotation powered pulsars and their surrounding nebulae using the sample of Kargaltsev & Pavlov (2008) and we complement this with an analysis of the gamma-ray-emission of Fermi detected pulsars. We report a strong trend in the efficiency with which spin-down power is converted to X-ray and gamma-ray emission with characteristic age: young pulsars and their surrounding nebulae are efficient X-ray emitters, whereas in contrast old pulsars are efficient gamma-ray emitters. We divided the X-ray sample in a young (Tau < 1.7x10^4 yr) and o…
The search for radio emission from the gamma pulsar J0357+3205 in the meter wavelength range was carried out. Periodic emission was found in one of the 1,700 observation sessions. The average pulsar profile is single-component with a half-width of 20-25 ms. Estimation of the pulsar flux density is 14 mJy.
Pulsars are known to be efficient accelerators that produce copious amounts of relativistic particles and inject them into the Galactic medium. The radiation emitted by such a pulsar wind can be seen from radio through gamma-rays as a pulsar-wind nebula (PWN). Here we overview and summarize recent progress in X-ray and TeV observations of PWNe.
We present the results from the analysis of the broad-band X-ray spectra of 5 Anomalous X-ray Pulsars (AXPs) and Soft $γ$-ray Repeaters (SGRs). We fit their Suzaku and INTEGRAL spectra with models appropriate for the X-ray emission from the accretion flow onto a pulsar. We find that their X-ray spectra can be well described with this model. In particular we find that: (a) the radius of the accretion column is $\sim150-350$ m resulting in a transverse optical depth of $\sim 1$; (b) the vertical Thompson optical depth is $\approx 50-400$, and (c) their luminosity translates in accretion rates $\…
The Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board the Fermi satellite has detected ~120 pulsars above 100 MeV. While most gamma-ray pulsars have spectra that are well modeled by a power law with an exponential cut-off at around a few GeV, some show significant pulsed high-energy (HE, >10 GeV) emission. I present a study of HE emission from LAT gamma-ray pulsars and discuss prospects for the detection of pulsations at very high energies (VHE, >100 GeV) with ground-based instruments.
Context: GeV gamma-ray pulsations from over 140 pulsars have been characterized using the Fermi Large Area Telescope, enabling improved understanding of the emission regions within the neutron star magnetospheres, and the contributions of pulsars to high energy electrons and diffuse gamma rays in the Milky Way. The first gamma-ray pulsars to be detected were the most intense and/or those with narrow pulses. Aims: As the Fermi mission progresses, progressively fainter objects can be studied. In addition to more distant pulsars (thus probing a larger volume of the Galaxy), or ones in high backgr…
The HAWC Gamma-Ray Observatory has reported the discovery of TeV gamma-ray emission extending several degrees around the positions of Geminga and B0656+14 pulsars. Assuming these gamma rays are produced by inverse Compton scattering off low-energy photons in electron halos around the pulsars, we determine the diffusion of electrons and positrons in the local interstellar medium. We will present the morphological and spectral studies of these two VHE gamma-ray sources and the derived positron spectrum at Earth.
Identifying as many gamma-ray pulsars as possible in the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) data helps test pulsar emission models by comparing predicted and observed properties for a large, varied sample with as little selection bias as possible. It also improves extrapolations from the observed population to estimate the contribution of unresolved pulsars to the diffuse gamma-ray emission. We use a recently developed method to determine the probability that a given gamma-ray photon comes from a known position in the sky, convolving the photon's energy with the LAT's energy-dependent point-spre…
Binary pulsar systems emit potentially detectable components of gamma ray emission due to Comptonization of the optical radiation of the companion star by relativistic electrons of the pulsar wind, both before and after termination of the wind. The recent optical observations of binary pulsar system PSR B1259-63/LS 2883 revealed radiation properties of the companion star which differ significantly from previous measurements. In this paper we study the implications of these observations for the interaction rate of the unshocked pulsar wind with the stellar photons and the related consequences f…
(abridged) Gamma-ray binaries are massive stars with compact object companions that are observed to emit most of their energy in the gamma-ray range. One of these binaries is known to contain a radio pulsar, PSR B1259-63. Synchrotron and inverse Compton emission from particles accelerated beyond the light cylinder in striped pulsar winds has been proposed to explain the X-ray to high energy (HE, $>$ 100 MeV) gamma-ray emission from isolated pulsars. This pulsar model extends naturally to binary environments, where seed photons for inverse Compton scattering are provided by the companion star. …
With the large sample of young gamma-ray pulsars discovered by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), population synthesis has become a powerful tool for comparing their collective properties with model predictions. We synthesised a pulsar population based on a radio emission model and four gamma-ray gap models (Polar Cap, Slot Gap, Outer Gap, and One Pole Caustic) normalizing to the number of detected radio pulsars in select group of surveys. The luminosity and the wide beams from the outer gaps can easily account for the number of Fermi detections in 2 years of observations. The wide slot-gap…
Recently, gamma-ray emission at TeV energies has been detected from the starburst galaxies NGC253 (Acero et al., 2009) and M82 (Acciari et al., 2009. It has been claimed that pion production due to cosmic rays accelerated in supernova remnants interacting with the interstellar gas is responsible for the observed gamma rays. Here, we show that the gamma-ray pulsar wind nebulae left behind by the supernovae contribute to the TeV luminosity in a major way. A single pulsar wind nebula produces about ten times the total luminosity of the Sun at energies above 1 TeV during a lifetime of 10^5 years. …
Star quakes and internal phase transitions within anomalous x-ray pulsars (AXPs) and soft $γ$-ray repeaters (SGRs) can produce mini contractions and pulsar glitches. Shocks break out from their surface following such contractions produce thermal x/$γ$-ray bursts. Highly relativistic dipolar $e^+e^-$ bunches launched from the pulsar polar caps emit fast radio bursts (FRBs) of narrowly beamed coherent curvature radiation, visible if they point in the direction of Earth. Although these surface x/$γ$-ray bursts are isotropic and are many orders of magnitude more energetic than the FRBs, they are d…
It is well known that, for bright gamma-ray pulsars with high statistics above a few GeV, the phase averaged spectral energy distribution (SED) is harder than a simple exponential cutoff above the break. We perform phase-resolved spectral analyses of bright gamma-ray pulsars and demonstrate that, even over narrow phase ranges, the SEDs of gamma-ray pulsars above the break energy are harder than a simple exponential cutoff. We argue within a radiation-reaction limited curvature framework that this is indicative of non-stationary emission or emission from multiple zones. Further, we address a co…
The Fermi Large Area Telescope, in collaboration with several groups from the radio community, have had marvellous success at uncovering new gamma-ray millisecond pulsars (MSPs). In fact, MSPs now make up a sizable fraction of the total number of known gamma-ray pulsars. The MSP population is characterized by a variety of pulse profile shapes, peak separations, and radio-to-gamma phase lags, with some members exhibiting nearly phase-aligned radio and gamma-ray light curves (LCs). The MSPs' short spin periods underline the importance of including special relativistic effects in LC calculations,…
The dramatic increase in the number of known gamma-ray pulsars since the launch of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly GLAST) offers the first opportunity to study a population of these high-energy objects. This catalog summarizes 46 high-confidence pulsed detections using the first six months of data taken by the Large Area Telescope (LAT), Fermi's main instrument. Sixteen previously unknown pulsars were discovered by searching for pulsed signals at the positions of bright gamma-ray sources seen with the LAT, or at the positions of objects suspected to be neutron stars based on obse…
In recent years, the Fermi-LAT gamma-ray telescope has detected a population of over 160 gamma-ray pulsars, which has enabled the detailed study of electromagnetic radiation from pulsars at energies above 100 MeV. Further, since the surprising detection of the Crab pulsar in very high-energy (VHE; E > 100 GeV) gamma rays by the MAGIC and VERITAS collaborations, there has been an ongoing effort in the astrophysics community to detect new pulsars in the VHE band. However, the Crab remains the only pulsar so far detected in VHE gamma rays, raising the question of whether or not the Crab is unique…
The search for pulsar (periodic) emission of five gamma-ray pulsars was carried out using the summed power spectra and the summed periodograms. No harmonics corresponding to the known pulsar periods were found. The upper estimations of the integral flux density of the pulsars J0357+3205 (<0.5 mJy), J0554+3107 (<0.5 mJy), J1958+2846 (<0.5 mJy), J2021+4026 (<0.4 mJy), and J2055+2539 (<0.55 mJy) is obtained.
We present new Chandra and XMM-Newton observations of a sample of eight radio-quiet Gamma-ray pulsars detected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope. For all eight pulsars we identify the X-ray counterpart, based on the X-ray source localization and the best position obtained from Gamma-ray pulsar timing. For PSR J2030+4415 we found evidence for an about 10 arcsec-long pulsar wind nebula. Our new results consolidate the work from Marelli et al. 2011 and confirm that, on average, the Gamma-ray--to--X-ray flux ratios (Fgamma/Fx) of radio-quiet pulsars are higher than for the radio-loud ones. Further…
The number of plausible associations of extended VHE (TeV) sources with pulsars has been steadily growing, suggesting that many of these sources are pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe). Here we overview the recent progress in X-ray and TeV observations of PWNe and summarize their properties.
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has revolutionized our knowledge of the gamma-ray pulsar population, leading to the discovery of almost 100 gamma-ray pulsars and dozens of gamma-ray millisecond pulsars (MSPs). Although the outer-gap model predicts different sites of emission for the radio and gamma-ray pulsars, until now all of the known gamma-ray MSPs have been visible in the radio. Here we report the discovery of a "radio-quiet" gamma-ray emitting MSP candidate by using Fermi, Chandra, Swift, and optical observations. The X-ray and gamma-ray properties of the source are consistent with k…
Gamma-ray loud X-ray binaries are binary systems that show non-thermal broadband emission from radio to gamma rays. If the system comprises a massive star and a young non-accreting pulsar, their winds will collide producing broadband non-thermal emission, most likely originated in the shocked pulsar wind. Thermal X-ray emission is expected from the shocked stellar wind, but until now it has neither been detected nor studied in the context of gamma-ray binaries. We present a semi-analytic model of the thermal X-ray emission from the shocked stellar wind in pulsar gamma-ray binaries, and find th…
The Large Area Telescope (LAT) on Fermi has detected ~150 gamma-ray pulsars, about a third of which were discovered in blind searches of the $γ$-ray data. Because the angular resolution of the LAT is relatively poor and blind searches for pulsars (especially millisecond pulsars, MSPs) are very sensitive to an error in the position, one must typically scan large numbers of locations. Identifying plausible X-ray counterparts of a putative pulsar drastically reduces the number of trials, thus improving the sensitivity of pulsar blind searches with the LAT. I discuss our ongoing program of Swift, …
At high-energy gamma-rays (>100 MeV) the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on the Fermi satellite already detected more than 145 rotation-powered pulsars (RPPs), while the number of pulsars seen at soft gamma-rays (20 keV - 30 MeV) remained small. We present a catalogue of 18 non-recycled RPPs from which presently non-thermal pulsed emission has been securely detected at soft gamma-rays above 20 keV, and characterize their pulse profiles and energy spectra. For 14 of them we report new results, (re)analysing mainly data from RXTE, INTEGRAL, XMM-Newton and Chandra. The soft gamma-pulsars are all fast …
Since the launch of the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, several hundred gamma-ray pulsars have been discovered, some being radio-loud and some radio-quiet with time-aligned radio and gamma-ray light curves. In the second Fermi Pulsar Catalogue, 117 new gamma-ray pulsars have been reported based on three years of data collected by the Large Area Telescope on the Fermi satellite, providing a wealth of information such as the peak separation~$Δ$ of the gamma-ray pulsations and the radio lag~$δ$ between the gamma-ray and radio pulses. We selected several radio-loud millisecond gamma-ray pulsars w…
We investigate the electrodynamic structure of a pulsar outer-magnetospheric particle accelerator and the resultant gamma-ray emission. By considering the condition for the accelerator to be self-sustained, we derive how the trans-magnetic-field thickness of the accelerator evolves with the pulsar age. It is found that the thickness is small but increases steadily if the neutron-star envelope is contaminated by sufficient light elements. For such a light element envelope, the gamma-ray luminosity of the accelerator is kept approximately constant as a function of age in the initial ten thousand…
The most energetic neutron stars, powered by their rotation, are capable of producing pulsed radiation from the radio up to gamma rays with nearly TeV energies. These pulsars are part of the universe of energetic and powerful particle accelerators, using their uniquely fast rotation and formidable magnetic fields to accelerate particles to ultra-relativistic speed. The extreme properties of these stars provide an excellent testing ground, beyond Earth experience, for nuclear, gravitational, and quantum-electrodynamical physics. A wealth of gamma-ray pulsars has recently been discovered with th…
The unexplained excess gamma-ray emission from the Milky Way's Galactic Center has puzzled astronomers for nearly a decade. Two theories strive to explain the origin of this excess: self-annihilating dark matter particles or an unresolved population of radio millisecond pulsars. We examine the plausibility of a pulsar origin for the GeV excess using N-body simulations. We simulated millisecond pulsars in a realistic dynamical environment: (i) pulsars were born from the known stellar mass components of our Galaxy; (ii) pulsars were given natal velocity kicks as empirically observed from two dif…
We present a summary of gamma-ray millisecond pulsar (MSP) observations with the Fermi Large Area Telescope. The radio and gamma-ray light curves of these MSPs have been modeled in the framework of the retarded vacuum dipole magnetic field. Likelihood fitting of the radio and gamma-ray light curves with geometric emission models allows us to give model-dependent confidence contours for the viewing geometry in these systems which are complementary to those from polarization measurements.
Pulsed high energy radiation from pulsars is not yet completely understood. In this paper, we use the 3D self-consistent annular gap model to study light curves for both young and millisecond pulsars observed by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The annular gap can generate high energy emission for short-period pulsars. The annular gap regions are so large that they have enough electric potential drop to accelerate charged particles to produce gamma-ray photons. For young pulsars, the emission region is from the neutron star surface to about half of the light cylinder radius, and the peak e…
