Population study for gamma-ray pulsars with the outer gap model

Abstract

Inspired by increase of population of $γ$-ray emitting pulsars by the $Fermi$ telescope, we perform a population study for $γ$-ray emitting canonical pulsars. We use a Monte-Carlo technique to simulate the Galactic population of neutron stars and the radio pulsars. For each simulated neutron star, we consider the $γ$-ray emission from the outer gap accelerator in the magnetosphere. In our outer gap model, we apply the gap closure mechanism proposed by Takata et al., in which both photon-photon pair-creation and magnetic pair-creation processes are considered. Simulating the sensitivities of previous major radio surveys, our simulation predicts that there are $\sim 18-23$ radio loud and $\sim 26-34$ $γ$-ray-selected $γ$-ray pulsars, which can be detected with a $γ$-ray flux $F_γ\ge 10^{-10}~\mathrm{erg/cm^2 s}$. Applying the sensitivity of the six-month observation of the $Fermi$ telescope, 40-61 radio-selected and 36-75 $γ$-ray selected pulsars are detected within our simulation. We show that the distributions of various pulsar parameters for the simulated $γ$-ray pulsars can be consistent with the observed distribution of the $γ$-ray pulsars detected by the $Fermi$ telescope. We also predict that $\sim 64$ radio-loud and $\sim 340$ $γ$-ray-selected pulsars irradiate the Earth with a flux $F_γ\ge 10^{-11}~\mathrm{erg/cm^2 s}$, and most of those $γ$-ray pulsars are distributing with a distance more than 1~kpc and a flux $F_γ\sim 10^{-11}~\mathrm{erg/cm^2 s}$. The ration between the radio-selected and $γ$-ray-selected pulsars depend on the sensitivity of the radio surveys. We also discuss the Galactic distribution of the unidentified $Fermi$ sources and the canonical $γ$-ray pulsars.

45 page, 10 figures, Accepted for publication in ApJ