Millisecond pulsars (MSPs) have high rotation rates of hundreds of Hertz, a result from spinning up an old neutron star by acquiring mass and angular momentum from a companion. Until this time, all such “recycled” rotation-powered pulsars have been discovered by their spin-modulated radio emission. The Fermi LAT confirmed that many radio-detected MSPs are also bright gamma-ray emitters by using the radio ephemeris. The LAT also provides for the first time sufficient sensitivity to detect many new pulsars via direct searches for periodicity in the sparse gamma-ray photons.
However, blind searches for MSPs in gamma-ray data are computationally vastly more involved than for slower pulsars because the search must extend to much higher spin frequencies. Furthermore, most MSPs are in binary systems, where the additionally unknown orbital parameters can increase the computational complexity of a blind search by orders of magnitude. I describe solutions to this computing challenge and present first results of a blind binary-MSP search of LAT data. The direct MSP detection from gamma-ray data opens up new possibilities for studies of extreme binary pulsars which are too radio faint to be found in typical radio searches.