Galactic Population of Radio and Gamma-Ray Pulsars

We simulate the characteristics of the Galactic population of radio and gamma-ray pulsars using Monte Carlo techniques. At birth, neutron stars are spatially distributed with supernova-kick velocities in the Galactic disk and randomly dispersed in age back to 10⁹ years. They are evolved in the Galactic gravitational potential to the present time. >From a radio luminosity model, the radio flux is filtered through a selected set of radio-survey parameters. Using the features of recent polar cap acceleration models invoking space-charge-limited flow, a pulsar death region further attenuates the population and radio-loud pulsars are assigned gamma-ray luminosities. In this paper, we will discuss detailed comparisons between the characteristics of calculated pulsars and those of observed pulsars. We will present predictions of the number of radio-loud, gamma-ray pulsars observed by EGRET and GLAST. This work was supported in part by the NSF grant no. SAA 9876670, NSF-REU, Research Corporation, and Michigan Space Grant Consortium.