Finding (or not) New Gamma-ray Pulsars with GLAST

Abstract

Young energetic pulsars will likely be the largest class of Galactic sources observed by GLAST, with many hundreds detected. Many will be unknown as radio pulsars, making pulsation detection dependent on radio and/or x-ray observations or on blind periodicity searches of the gamma-rays. Estimates for the number of pulsars GLAST will detect in blind searches have ranged from tens to many hundreds. I argue that the number will be near the low end of this range, partly due to observations being made in a scanning as opposed to a pointing mode. This paper briefly reviews how blind pulsar searches will be conducted using GLAST, what limits these searches, and how the computations and statistics scale with various parameters.