Pulsar Observations with the Fermi Large Area Telescope

TL;DR

This paper details Fermi LAT's gamma-ray pulsar observations, presenting light curves, spectral measurements, validation methods, and discoveries of new gamma-ray pulsars, enhancing understanding of high-energy pulsar emissions.

Contribution

It introduces a method for validating LAT's effective area on-orbit, estimates systematic uncertainties, and reports new gamma-ray pulsar discoveries with detailed timing and spectral analysis.

Findings

Detection of new gamma-ray pulsars including PSR J0205+6449

Development of a validation method for instrument response functions

Analysis of spectral properties of gamma-ray pulsars

Abstract

The Large Area Telescope (LAT) on Fermi, launched on 2008 June 11, is a space telescope to explore the high energy gamma-ray universe. The instrument covers the energy range from 20 MeV to 300 GeV with greatly improved sensitivity and ability to localize gamma-ray point sources. It detects gamma-rays through conversion to electron-positron pairs and measurement of their direction in a tracker and their energy in a calorimeter. This thesis presents the gamma-ray light curves and the phase-resolved spectral measurements of radio-loud gamma-ray pulsars detected by the LAT. The measurement of pulsar spectral parameters (i.e. integrated flux, spectral index, and energy cut-off) depends on the instrument response functions (IRFs). A method developed for the on-orbit validation of the effective area is presented using the Vela pulsar. The cut efficiencies between the real data and the simulated data are compared at each stage of the background rejection. The results are then propagated to the IRFs, allowing the systematic uncertainties of the spectral parameters to be estimated. The last part of this thesis presents the discoveries, using both the LAT observations and the radio and X ephemeredes, of new individual gamma-ray pulsars such as PSR J0205+6449, and the Vela-like pulsars J2229+6114 and J1048-5832. Timing and spectral analysis are investigated in order to constrain the gamma-ray emission model. In addition, we discuss the properties of a large population of gamma-ray pulsars detected by the LAT, including normal pulsars, and millisecond pulsars.