Population Synthesis of Radio Pulsars in the Fermi Era

TL;DR

This paper presents a Monte-Carlo based population synthesis model of Galactic radio pulsars, incorporating polarization and pulse profile data to improve understanding of pulsar emission and evolution, with implications for gamma-ray pulsar studies.

Contribution

It introduces a new model linking radio luminosity and core-to-cone flux ratios, and explores neutron star evolution with various magnetic field decay scenarios.

Findings

Short period pulsars are more cone-dominated.

Simulated populations match observed radio pulsar distributions.

Model can predict gamma-ray pulsar populations for Fermi comparisons.

Abstract

We present results of our pulsar population synthesis of normal pulsars from the Galactic disk using our previously developed Monte-Carlo code. From our studies of observed radio pulsars that have clearly identifiable core and cone components, in which we fit the polarization sweep as well as the pulse profiles in order to constrain the viewing geometry, we develop a model describing the luminosity and ratio of radio core-to-cone peak fluxes. In this model, short period pulsars are more cone-dominated. We explore models of neutron star evolution with and without magnetic field decay, and with different initial period distributions. We present preliminary results including simulated population statistics that are compared with the observed radio pulsar population. The evolved neutron star populations resulting from this simulation can be used to model distributions of gamma-ray pulsars for comparison to Fermi results.