English

Magnetic fields in axisymmetric neutron stars

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2012-02-10 v2

Abstract

We derive general equations for axisymmetric Newtonian MHD and use these as the basis of a code for calculating equilibrium configurations of rotating magnetised neutron stars in a stationary state. We investigate the field configurations that result from our formalism, which include purely poloidal, purely toroidal and mixed fields. For the mixed-field formalism the toroidal component appears to be bounded at less than 7%. We calculate distortions induced both by magnetic fields and by rotation. From our non-linear work we are able to look at the realm of validity of perturbative work: we find for our results that perturbative-regime formulae for magnetic distortions agree to within 10% of the nonlinear results if the ellipticity is less than 0.15 or the average field strength is less than 101710^{17} G. We also consider how magnetised equilibrium structures vary for different polytropic indices.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0903.0827,
  title  = {Magnetic fields in axisymmetric neutron stars},
  author = {S. K. Lander and D. I. Jones},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0903.0827},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

19 pages, 11 figures; typos removed, one paragraph of Discussion rewritten

R2 v1 2026-06-21T12:18:23.376Z