Galactic pulsar population: Current understanding and future prospects

The main objectives of modeling the Galactic pulsar population are (i) to understand underlying properties of various pulsar subclasses, and (ii) to probe physical conditions relevant to the formation and evolution of these objects. A theoretical approach is useful to explore various stellar populations, but introduces large systematic uncertainties in results. An empirical approach is known to be more reliable, but is limited only to known populations. Traditionally, the pulsar population studies focused on isolated, slowly rotating 'normal' pulsars that are the majority of the known pulsars. With improved pulsar search techniques and more sensitive instruments, the known pulsar sample has been greatly expanding, both in quality and quantity, over the past 40 years. The increased number of pulsar sample allows more rigorous statistical analysis on the normal population. Moreover, there are many new populations to be studied, such as relativistic pulsar binaries, millisecond pulsars, or pulsars in globular clusters.