Radio pulsar populations

The goal of this article is to summarize the current state of play in the field of radio pulsar statistics. Simply put, from the observed sample of objects from a variety of surveys with different telescopes, we wish to infer the properties of the underlying sample and to connect these with other astrophysical populations (for example supernova remnants or X-ray binaries). The main problem we need to tackle is the fact that, like many areas of science, the observed populations are often heavily biased by a variety of selection effects. After a review of the main effects relevant to radio pulsars, I discuss techniques to correct for them and summarize some of the most recent results. Perhaps the main point I would like to make in this article is that current models to describe the population are far from complete and often suffer from strong covariances between input parameters. That said, there are a number of very interesting conclusions that can be made concerning the evolution of neutron stars based on current data. While the focus of this review will be on the population of isolated Galactic pulsars, I will also briefly comment on millisecond and binary pulsars as well as the pulsar content of globular clusters and the Magellanic Clouds.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Proceedings of ICREA Workshop on The High-Energy Emission from Pulsars and their Systems, Sant Cugat, Spain, 2010 April 12-16 (Springer

X-ray populations in galaxies

Today's sensistive, high resolution Chandra X-ray observations allow the study of many populations of X-ray sources. The traditional astronomical tools of photometric diagrams and luminosity functions are now applied to these populations, and provide the means for classifying the X-ray sources and probing their evolution. While overall stellar mass drives the amount of X-ray binaries in old stellar population, the amount of sources in star-forming galaxies is related to the star formation rate. Shart-lived, luminous, high mass binaries (HNXBs) dominate these young populations.Comment: This is a review talk,to be published in the proceedings of the IAU Symposium 230, Populations of high energy sources in galaxies, held in Dublin (Ireland), August 15-19, 200

Stochastic delocalization of finite populations

Heterogeneities in environmental conditions often induce corresponding heterogeneities in the distribution of species. In the extreme case of a localized patch of increased growth rates, reproducing populations can become strongly concentrated at the patch despite the entropic tendency for population to distribute evenly. Several deterministic mathematical models have been used to characterize the conditions under which localized states can form, and how they break down due to convective driving forces. Here, we study the delocalization of a finite population in the presence of number fluctuations. We find that any finite population delocalizes on sufficiently long time scales. Depending on parameters, however, populations may remain localized for a very long time. The typical waiting time to delocalization increases exponentially with both population size and distance to the critical wind speed of the deterministic approximation. We augment these simulation results by a mathematical analysis that treats the reproduction and migration of individuals as branching random walks subject to global constraints. For a particular constraint, different from a fixed population size constraint, this model yields a solvable first moment equation. We find that this solvable model approximates very well the fixed population size model for large populations, but starts to deviate as population sizes are small. The analytical approach allows us to map out a phase diagram of the order parameter as a function of the two driving parameters, inverse population size and wind speed. Our results may be used to extend the analysis of delocalization transitions to different settings, such as the viral quasi-species scenario