Luminosities of recycled radio pulsars in globular clusters

Understand

Using Monte Carlo simulations, we model the luminosity distribution of recycled pulsars in globular clusters as the brighter, observable part of an intrinsic distribution and find that the observed luminosities can be reproduced using either log-normal or power-law distributions as the underlying luminosity function.

• For both distributions, a wide range of model parameters provide an acceptable match to the observed sample, with the log-normal function providing statistically better agreement in general than the power-law models.
• Moreover, the power-law models predict a parent population size that is a factor of between two and ten times higher than for the log-normal models.
• We note that the log-normal luminosity distribution found for the normal pulsar population by Faucher-Gigu\`ere and Kaspi is consistent with the observed luminosities of globular cluster pulsars.