On Detecting Millisecond Pulsars at the Galactic Center

Understand

The lack of detected pulsars at the Galactic Center (GC) region is a long-standing mystery.

• We argue that the high stellar density in the central parsec around the GC is likely to result in a pulsar population dominated by millisecond pulsars (MSPs), similar to the situation in globular cluster environments.
• Earlier GC pulsar searches have been largely insensitive to such an MSP population, accounting for the lack of pulsar detections.
• We estimate the best search frequency for such an MSP population with present and upcoming broad-band radio telescopes for two possible scattering scenarios, the "weak-scattering" case suggested by the recent detection of a magnetar close to the GC, and the "strong-scattering" case, with the scattering screen located close to the GC.