Parkes observations for project P1152 semester 2022APRS_08

Brief description

A large population of millisecond pulsars (MSPs) is expected in the Galactic bulge and is supported, among others, by the existence of a spatially extended gamma-ray excess emission discovered in Fermi-LAT data towards the inner Galaxy. Discovering MSPs in the Galactic bulge, would be a major breakthrough with strong impact onto several fields. In Berteaud et al. [2021a, 2021b], we have designed a new method to select bulge MSP candidates among Chandra X-ray cataloged sources. We also analysed imaging data of the VLA and identified 5 potential bulge MSP candidates, detected both with Chandra and VLA. Here we propose to follow up these 5 sources with the UWL receiver system on Parkes, which has the unique potential of probe their MSP nature thanks to multi-band, deep, observations. With the requested time, for two high-priority candidates, we will be able identify any bulge MSP with a pulse period P > 1 ms. Three targets at lower priority can be identified as bulge MSP if their period is larger than 4 ms. Our goal is to provide the first multi-wavelength diagnostics of bulge MSPs, gather information about the MSP/pulsar ratio among the bulge X-ray candidates, and, finally, unveil the nature of the mysterious Fermi-LAT excess.