Fermi LAT Discovery of Gamma-ray Pulsars in a Blind Search


Abstract in English

The Large Area Telescope (LAT) on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly GLAST), with its improved sensitivity relative to previous generation gamma-ray telescopes, is significantly increasing the number of known gamma-ray sources in the sky, including pulsars. In addition to searching for gamma-ray emission from known radio pulsars, it is now possible to successfully perform blind searches for pulsars on the gamma-ray data alone, with the goal of uncovering a new population of potentially radio-quiet (Geminga-like) pulsars. We describe our methods and some recent results from our searches, performed using the time-differencing technique, which have resulted in the discovery of a large number of new gamma-ray pulsars.

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