Pulsar populations and unidentified γ-ray sources

Abstract The EGRET telescope on the Compton Gamma-ray Observatory detected over 200 sources and the majority of these are still unidentified. At least three subpopulations of EGRET sources have been associated with the Galaxy: bright sources lying along the Galactic plane, weaker sources spatially correlated with the Gould Belt and a high-latitude, halo population. Many of these sources may be pulsars and there are more than two-dozen radio pulsars in or near EGRET source error boxes, most of them recently discovered in the Parkes Multibeam Survey. We present results from several population synthesis studies of pulsars in the Galaxy, which predict the number of pulsars detected by γ-ray and radio surveys assuming models for the high-energy emission beam and its relation to the radio beam. Future γ-ray pulsar detections by AGILE and GLAST together with the recent large rise in the radio pulsar population will give greatly improved statistics. The relative numbers of radio and γ-ray pulsars detected in the plane and in the Gould Belt populations will provide an important discriminator between models of high-energy emission and will profoundly affect the numbers and birth rate of pulsars in the Galaxy.