Discovery of Three Pulsars from a Galactic Center Pulsar Population

Understand

We report the discovery of three pulsars whose large dispersion measures and angular proximity to \sgr indicate the existence of a Galactic center population of neutron stars.

• The relatively long periods (0.98 to 1.48 s) most likely reflect strong selection against short-period pulsars from radio-wave scattering at the observation frequency of 2 GHz used in our survey with the Green Bank Telescope.
• One object (PSR J1746-2850I) has a characteristic spindown age of only 13 kyr along with a high surface magnetic field $\sim 4\times 10^{13}$ G.
• It and a second object found in the same telescope pointing, PSR J1746-2850II (which has the highest known dispersion measure among pulsars), may have originated from recent star formation in the Arches or Quintuplet clusters given their angular locations.