Establishing a connection between high-power pulsars and very-high-energy gamma-ray sources

Recent advances in the instrumentation to observe very-high energy (VHE) gamma rays have made the discovery of many new sources possible, most of them being discovered in the galactic plane survey of H.E.S.S., an array of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes in Namibia. Of these sources, a significant number can be identified as pulsar wind nebulae. It has long been known that pulsars can drive powerful winds of highly relativistic particles which might result in VHE gamma radiation via inverse Compton upscattering of ambient photons. Details of the energy conversion mechanisms in the vicinity of pulsars are not well understood, nor is it known if all pulsars drive pulsar wind nebulae and emit high-energy radiation. It will be shown that for a sample of pulsars in the central Milky Way, pulsars with large spin-down energy flux are with a high probability associated with VHE gamma-ray sources detected by H.E.S.S. and that these pulsars emit on the order of 1% of their spin-down energy in tera electron volt gamma-ray energies