DR. MANJARI BAGCHI

From the time of their discovery, millisecond pulsars have intrigued astronomers with their enigmatic properties. While over the decades, a standard paradigm seems to have evolved regarding their "standard" evolutionary history, recent observations have produced several inconsistencies and puzzles. The speaker will address some of these inconsistencies especially for millisecond pulsars in Galactic globular clusters. The luminosity distribution of these objects has been modeled to predict the total number of pulsars in different globular clusters. Although, in general, our predictions are similar to those of earlier studies for the total gamma-ray or radio fluxes from the clusters, in contradiction to earlier works, no significant correlation is found between the number of pulsars and globular cluster parameters such as metallicity and stellar encounter rate. Moreover, no clear difference is seen between the luminosity distributions of the cluster and disk counterpart pulsars. The speaker shall discuss possible reasons for this apparent discrepancy and the scope of future improvement of our study.