Abstract
Most of the sources in the Galactic plane detected by the EGRET instrument on board the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory remain unidentified. Since the energy spectra of some of them strongly suggest that the gamma-ray emission originates from pulsars, it is interesting to look for pulsations in the data. However, detecting pulsations in gamma-ray emission by a blind search, that is, without prior knowledge of the pulsar spin parameters, is exceedingly difficult. Previous gamma-ray pulsar blind searches have relied on the execution of very long FFTs, requiring the use of supercomputers. We present a pulsar blind search, based on our time-differencing technique, that can be carried out more economically, in this case, on a standard PC. We present results from the application of this method to a periodicity search on all 271 sources from the third EGRET catalog. No statistically significant new detection was found, for a flux sensitivity of about 10−6 photons cm−2 s−1.
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