Enhancing Fermi-LAT Pulsar Sensitivity with Spectroscopy
Abstract
Radio-loud and GeV-bright pulsars are central to the effort to understand high-energy emission from pulsar magnetospheres. The Pulsar Timing Consortium (PTC) is timing over 200 high-luminosity pulsars to produce ephemerides for use in Fermi-LAT pulsation searches, and over 25 radio-loud pulsars have been detected in gamma rays. However, pulsars clustered along the Galactic plane suffer from the strong diffuse background at low Galactic latitudes and from source confusion, and the pulsed signal may be obscured. On the other hand, millisecond pulsars at high Galactic latitude are generally weak GeV sources, and it is important to maximize the pulsed signal. Both situations can be ameliorated by using spectroscopy to help discriminate between photons associated with the pulsar and the background. We propose a pulsation search using spectroscopic weights and apply the method to all pulsars timed by the PTC, and we present the resulting newly-detected pulsars.
- Publication:
-
AAS/High Energy Astrophysics Division #11
- Pub Date:
- March 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010HEAD...11.2303K