Extreme gamma-ray pulsars (and what CTAO can say about them)

At the dawn of the century only a handful of pulsars had been found to pulse in gamma-rays, and certainly none was supposed to emit beyond the GeV scale.

Over the past two decades, thanks to the Fermi-LAT, the situation has dramatically changed: we now know more than 300 such objects, and the number keeps increasing. Behaving as lepton factories and natural particle accelerators, the physics of gamma-ray pulsars still lacks a complete, coherent description. As was first realized in early MAGIC observations of the Crab, some of these objects elude the strong spectral cutoff imposed by their own gargantuan magnetic field and find a way to emit well beyond the tens of GeV, into (and beyond!) the TeV scale. This makes these «extreme» pulsars targets for imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes and has prompted a progressive «migration» of the emission scenarios farther away from the neutron star.

In this talk I will briefly introduce some basic concepts of pulsar physics, review current results and discuss present hot topics. Finally, I will also show how the upcoming CTAO has the potential to spark a second-revolution in gamma pulsars, its consequences stretching even beyond the usual boundary of astrophysics.

Fecha y lugar: 11/11/2025 – 12:30 | Sala de Juntas
Giovanni Ceribella
Max Planck for Physics (MPP)