• Energy Research

Abstract We present 294 pulsars found in GeV data from the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Another 33 millisecond pulsars (MSPs) discovered in deep radio searches of LAT sources will likely reveal pulsations once phase-connected rotation ephemerides are achieved. A further dozen optical and/or X-ray binary systems colocated with LAT sources also likely harbor gamma-ray MSPs. This catalog thus reports roughly 340 gamma-ray pulsars and candidates, 10% of all known pulsars, compared to ≤11 known before Fermi. Half of the gamma-ray pulsars are young. Of these, the half that are undetected in radio have a broader Galactic latitude distribution than the young radio-loud pulsars. The others are MSPs, with six undetected in radio. Overall, ≥236 are bright enough above 50 MeV to fit the pulse profile, the energy spectrum, or both. For the common two-peaked profiles, the gamma-ray peak closest to the magnetic pole crossing generally has a softer spectrum. The spectral energy distributions tend to narrow as the spindown power E ̇ decreases to its observed minimum near 1033 erg s−1, approaching the shape for synchrotron radiation from monoenergetic electrons. We calculate gamma-ray luminosities when distances are available. Our all-sky gamma-ray sensitivity map is useful for population syntheses. The electronic catalog version provides gamma-ray pulsar ephemerides, properties, and fit results to guide and be compared with modeling results.

The outreach program “A scuola di Astroparticelle” was proposed in 2016 by the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN - Napoli Division) in collaboration with the Physics Department “Ettore Pancini” of the Federico II University in Napoli, CNR-SPIN and CNR-ISASI Institutes. Its main goal is to engage teachers and students of High Schools in astroparticle physics projects. For the third edition (2018/19), the activities, which are also part of the Italian Educational Program PCTO - “Percorsi per le Competenze Trasversali e per l'Orientamento”, involved 18 schools for a total of 21 projects on several topics. Some projects were strictly related to astroparticles as cosmic rays, while others were more technical, as the development of particle detectors, or cross-disciplinary projects. Students worked for the entire school year and prepared materials for the final event. More than 600 students attended the event and presented their work to a jury with a poster and an oral presentation in plenary sessions. Since 2018, the program is part of OCRA - Outreach Cosmic Ray Activities - a national outreach project of INFN with the aim of collecting, within a common framework, the numerous outreach activities in cosmic-ray field carried out at the local level. The fourth edition (2019-20), in spite of the difficult situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has also seen the participation of 22 schools that carried out part of the activities in an online format. The project realized using the open data of the Pierre Auger Observatory will be presented in detail.