New Neighbours: Modelling the Growing Population of Gamma-ray Millisecond Pulsars

Abstract

The Fermi Large Area Telescope, in collaboration with several groups from the radio community, have had marvellous success at uncovering new gamma-ray millisecond pulsars (MSPs). In fact, MSPs now make up a sizable fraction of the total number of known gamma-ray pulsars. The MSP population is characterized by a variety of pulse profile shapes, peak separations, and radio-to-gamma phase lags, with some members exhibiting nearly phase-aligned radio and gamma-ray light curves (LCs). The MSPs' short spin periods underline the importance of including special relativistic effects in LC calculations, even for emission originating from near the stellar surface. We present results on modelling and classification of MSP LCs using standard pulsar model geometries.

4 pages, 2 figures, proceedings of the ICREA Workshop on The High-Energy Emission from Pulsars and their Systems (HEEPS), Sant Cugat, Spain

References in corpus (4)

• The First Fermi Large Area Telescope Catalog of Gamma-ray Pulsars
• Modeling of Gamma-Ray Pulsar Light Curves with Force-Free Magnetic Field
• Probing millisecond pulsar emission geometry using light curves from the Fermi Large Area Telescope
• Discovery of Pulsed $\gamma$-rays from PSR J0034-0534 with the Fermi LAT: A Case for Co-located Radio and $\gamma$-ray Emission Regions