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

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of numerous gamma-ray pulsars through blind searches using Fermi LAT data, significantly expanding the known pulsar population, including radio-quiet types, with advanced search techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel blind search method using time-differencing, leading to the discovery of many new gamma-ray pulsars, including radio-quiet ones.

Findings

Discovery of numerous new gamma-ray pulsars.

Successful identification of radio-quiet pulsars.

Validation of the time-differencing search technique.

Abstract

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.