Hope College Department of Physics and Engineering
Research Experiences for Undergraduates
Summer 2006
Project Summary

 

Project Title:

Incorporating New Models of Pulsar Emission into Population Synthesis

Student Name: Brian Clow
Student's Home Institution: Hope College
Research Advisor: Dr. Peter Gonthier
Source of Support: NSF RUI AST Grant No. 0307365

In order to incorporate the high altitude slot gap model of γ - ray emission and the caustic model of radio emission into our pulsar population statistics, some computations were created to read phase plots created by a separate code. The phase plots are maps of the relative intensities as a function of the phase angle and the viewing geometry and take into account the special-relativistic effects of aberration, time delay, and magnetic sweepback. They were interpolated to create feasible pulsar profiles, and then were normalized to provide the average fluxes. These were used in our population statistics, which use Monte Carlo techniques to simulate pulsars within our Galaxy. The possible correlation between the radio and γ -ray profiles can be used to distinguish and evaluate the slot gap and outer gap models. Instruments such as GLAST, AGILE, and EGRET can be simulated in order to compare visible pulsars produced by these models, furthering the evaluation of each.

*This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF-REU Grant No. 0452206

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Publications and Presentations:

"Population statistics of radio and γ-ray pulsars form the Galactic disk", P.L. Gonthier, S.A. Story, B.D. Clow, and A.K. Harding, 2007, to appear in conference proceedings AIP.
"Population statistics of radio and γ-ray pulsars form the Galactic disk", P.L. Gonthier, S.A. Story, B.D. Clow, and A.K. Harding, 2007. The First GLAST Symposium, Sanford, California, February 5-8, 2007, edited by S.Ritz, P. Michelson & C. Meegan, AIP Conference Proceedings, New York, ISBN:978-0-7354-0431-1, 921,431.
"Population statistics study of radio and gamma-ray pulsars in the Galactic plane", P.L. Gonthier, S.A. Story, B.D. Clow, and A.K. Harding, in Proceedings of the Multi-Messanger Approach to High-Energy Gamma-Ray Sources, Barcelona, Spain, July 4-7, 2006, edited by J.M. Paredes, O. Reimer, and D.F. Torres, 2007, Springer, ISBN: 978-1-4020-6117-2, pp. 245-251.