Discovery of two pulsars towards the Galactic Centre

We report the discovery of two highly dispersed pulsars in the direction of the Galactic Centre made during a survey at 3.1 GHz with the Parkes radio telescope. Both PSRs J1745-2912 and J1746-2856 have an angular separation from the Galactic Centre of less than 0.(circle)3 and dispersion measures in excess of 1100 cm(-3) pc, placing them in the top 10 pulsars when ranked on this value. The frequency dependence of the scatter-broadening in PSR J1746-2856 is much shallower than expected from simple theory. We believe it likely that the pulsars are located between 150 and 500 pc from the Galactic Centre on the near side, and are part of an excess population of neutron stars associated with the Centre itself. A second survey made at 8.4 GHz did not detect any pulsars. This implies either that there are not many bright, long-period pulsars at the Galactic Centre or that the scattering is more severe at high frequencies than current models would suggest.