The XMM Deep Galactic Plane Survey

We propose a deep survey of part of the galactic plane with XMM.The main goals of this survery are twofold. (1) To better characterize the spectrum and galactic latitude dependence of the galactic ridge emission and (2) to search for faint absorbed pulsars which are being detected at close to the limiting sensitivity of current instrumentation.The proposed XMM observations will allow the search for these objects to be conducted a factor virgul10 fainter than previous surveys.