Einstein@Home Searches for Gamma-Ray Pulsars in the Inner Galaxy

Abstract The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) has revealed a mysterious extended excess of GeV gamma-ray emission around the Galactic Center (GC), which can potentially be explained by unresolved emission from a population of pulsars, particularly millisecond pulsars (MSPs), in the Galactic bulge. We used the distributed volunteer computing system Einstein@Home to search the Fermi-LAT data for gamma-ray pulsations from sources in the inner Galaxy, to try to identify the brightest members of this putative population. We discovered four new pulsars, including one new MSP and one young pulsar whose angular separation to the GC of 0 . ° 93 is the smallest of any known gamma-ray pulsar. We demonstrate a phase-resolved difference imaging technique that allows the flux from this pulsar to be disentangled from the diffuse GC emission. No radio pulsations were detected from the four new pulsars in archival radio observations or during the MPIfR-MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey. While the distances to these pulsars remain uncertain, we find that it is more likely that they are all foreground sources from the Galactic disk, rather than pulsars originating from the predicted bulge population. Nevertheless, our results are not incompatible with an MSP explanation for the GC excess, as only one or two members of this population would have been detectable in our searches.