The TRAPUM Survey for New Gamma-ray Pulsars

One major goal of the TRAPUM Large Survey Project is to use MeerKAT to discover new millisecond pulsars by targeting unidentified GeV gamma-ray sources detected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). This sub-project has now discovered more than 30 new pulsars through short, repeated observations of around 150 Fermi-LAT sources. In this talk, I will describe our ongoing survey, and present highlights from among these new discoveries, many of which are in exotic, short-period ``spider'' binaries, whose discovery rate has been significantly boosted by MeerKAT's exceptional sensitivity. MeerKAT's unique capabilities provide us with sub-arcsecond localisations for our new discoveries, enabling rapid identification of multi-wavelength counterparts to follow up, and easing the process of obtaining full timing solutions and detecting gamma-ray pulsations. I will explain how this allows us to maximise the scientific potential of our new discoveries, with goals ranging from constraining the neutron star equation-of-state with new pulsar-mass measurements, to providing new sources for pulsar timing array projects, and even searching for continuous gravitational waves from our new pulsars in archival detector data.