Colin Clark

The Einstein@Home Survey for Gamma-ray Pulsars

Since the launch of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in 2008, the onboard Large Area Telescope (LAT) has detected gamma-ray pulsations from more than 200 pulsars. A large fraction of these remain
undetected in radio observations, and could only be found by directly searching the LAT data for pulsations. However, the sensitivity of such « blind » searches is limited by the sparse photon data and vast computational requirements. In this talk I will describe the latest large-scale blind-search survey for gamma-ray pulsars which ran on the distributed volunteer computing system, Einstein@Home. This survey has discovered 17 new gamma-ray pulsars, including two glitching pulsars, and the youngest known radio-quiet gamma-ray pulsar. I will explain how recent improvements to search techniques and the LAT data reconstruction have boosted the sensitivity of blind searches such as this, and will present highlights from the results of the survey.