Gamma ray pulsars with the GLAST LAT
Résumé
The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) will be launched less than a year from now, and its Large Area Telescope (LAT) is expected to discover scores to hundreds of gamma-ray pulsars. This poster discusses which of the over 1700 known pulsars, mostly visible only at radio frequencies, are likely to emit >100 MeV gamma-rays with intensities detectable by the LAT. The main figure of merit used to select gamma-ray pulsar candidates is sqrt(E-dot)/d2, where E-dot is the energy loss due to rotational spindown, and d is the distance to the pulsar. The figure of merit incorporates spin-down flux at earth (proportional to E-dot/d2) times efficiency, assumed proportional to 1/sqrt(E-dot). A few individual objects are cited to illustrate the issues. Since large E-dot pulsars also tend to have large timing noise and occasional glitches, their ephemerides can become inaccurate in weeks to months. To detect and study the gamma-ray emission the photons must be accurately tagged with the pulse phase. With hours to days between gamma-ray photon arrival times from a pulsar and months to years of LAT exposure needed for good detections, GLAST will need timing measurements throughout the continuous gamma-ray observations. The poster will describe efforts to coordinate pulsar timing of the candidate gamma-ray pulsars.