Populating the Galaxy with pulsars -- II. Galactic dynamics
  We produce synthetic populations of pulsars within our Galaxy and calculate
the resulting scale heights as well as the radial and space velocity
distributions of the pulsars. Results are presented for isolated pulsars,
binary pulsars and millisecond pulsars. We also test the robustness of the
outcomes to variations in the assumed form of the Galactic potential, the birth
distribution of binary positions, and the strength of the velocity kick given
to neutron stars at birth. We find that isolated pulsars have a greater scale
height than binary pulsars. This is also true when restricted to millisecond
pulsars unless we allow for low-mass stars to be ablated by radiation from
their pulsar companion in which case the isolated and binary scale heights are
comparable. Double neutron stars are found to have a large variety of space
velocities, in particular, some systems have speeds similar to the Sun. We look
in detail at the predicted Galactic population of millisecond pulsars with
black hole companions, including their formation pathways, and show where the
short-period systems reside in the Galaxy. Some of our population predictions
are compared in a limited way to observations but the full potential of this
aspect will be realised in the near future when we complete our population
synthesis code with the selection effects component.
