Gamma-ray pulsars in the Fermi LAT era

Abstract

Observations over the past two years with the Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have led to a tenfold increase in the number of known γ-ray pulsars. Roughly one third of this population consists of young radio-loud pulsars, one third are radio-quiet pulsars discovered in blind searches of LAT data, and one third are γ-ray millisecond pulsars (MSPs). In this paper I discuss what we have learned about these three populations, as well as prospects for further discoveries. © Società Italiana di Fisica.