Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Fermi-LAT: An Amazing Pulsar Finding Machine

Paul Ray

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

After three years of operation, the Fermi-LAT has crossed a major milestone, detecting its 100th gamma-ray pulsar. The pulsars are divided into 3 approximately equal categories: young radio pulsars, millisecond pulsars, and young pulsars detected from blind searches of the gamma-ray data. I will describe the techniques that enabled these discoveries and discuss some of the implications of this wide variety of pulsars. Finally, I will speculate on the prospects for even more exciting results, such as the first radio-quiet millisecond pulsar.