The Einstein@Home Gamma-ray Pulsar Survey. I. Search Methods, Sensitivity and Discovery of New Young Gamma-ray Pulsars

TL;DR

This paper details a large-scale blind search for gamma-ray pulsars using Fermi LAT data and volunteer computing, leading to the discovery of 17 young gamma-ray pulsars and providing insights into their properties and detection sensitivity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel search method applied to extensive Fermi LAT data, resulting in the discovery of 17 new gamma-ray pulsars, including the slowest spinning ones and a pulsar with a large glitch.

Findings

Discovered 17 gamma-ray pulsars, 13 of which are newly reported.

Identified pulsars with ages from 12 kyr to 2 Myr and high spin-down powers.

Estimated search sensitivity and constrained gamma-ray emission from the Cas A neutron star.

Abstract

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 between $10^{34}$ and $4\times10^{36}$ erg/s. Two of these are the slowest spinning gamma-ray pulsars yet known. One pulsar experienced a very large glitch $\Delta f/f \approx 3.5\times10^{-6}$ during the Fermi mission. In this, the first of two associated papers, we describe the search scheme used in this survey, and estimate the sensitivity of our search to pulsations in unidentified Fermi-LAT sources. One such estimate results in an upper limit of 57% for the fraction of pulsed emission from the gamma-ray source associated with the Cas A supernova remnant, constraining the pulsed gamma-ray photon flux that can be produced by the neutron star at its center. We also present the results of precise timing analyses for each of the newly detected pulsars.