Modeling and Maximum Likelihood Fitting of Millisecond Pulsar Gamma-ray and Radio Lightcurves

The Large Area Telescope on-board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected significant pulsations from many known millisecond pulsars, helped discover new radio millisecond pulsars, and detected significant gamma-ray emission from the vicinity of eight globular clusters which display the characteristic pulsar gamma-ray spectrum. These discoveries suggest that gamma-ray emission from millisecond pulsars must be the rule and not the exception. We have produced radio and gamma-ray light curve simulations, assuming a retarded vacuum-dipole magnetic field geometry, for several geometric gamma-ray emission models and a radio cone beam model, and developed a Markov chain Monte Carlo maximum likelihood fitting technique to compare with the observations. This technique produces confidence contours in pulsar viewing geometry space which can be directly compared with those from radio polarization measurements. These results can provide a basis for studying the emission properties of population models used to simulate the combined emission of many millisecond pulsars as observed in globular clusters, as well as the probable contributions to the Galactic and isotropic diffuse gamma-ray emissions.