Radio Pulsars in the Galactic Center

Radio pulsars in the Galactic center would serve as useful probes of its magnetoionic medium, and possibly its spacetime structure. However, of the roughly 1200 known pulsars, no more than 1% are within 1° of Sgr A* and none have distances consistent with being within or behind the Galactic center. This deficit of pulsars is due to interstellar scattering so severe as to smear together individual pulses. We are engaged in multiwavelength surveys of the GC to identify radio pulsars. Using the VLA at 1.4 GHz we are searching for compact radio sources, with the objective of finding sources on which a periodicity search can be conducted at frequencies high enough to defeat the interstellar pulse broadening (>10 GHz). With the Chandra X-ray survey of the Galactic center, we have also discovered a number of X-ray point sources with radio counterparts that may be radio pulsars. Our current total census of promising radio pulsars candidates is roughly 10 sources. We are pursuing periodicity searches of these objects on the 100 m Efflesberg and Green Bank Telescopes. The number of candidates also allow us to constrain the supernova rate, and therefore star formation history, in the GC.