English

Pulsar Population Synthesis with Magnetorotational Evolution: Constraining the Decay of Magnetic field

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2026-04-16 v4

Abstract

We present a population synthesis model for normal radio pulsars in the Galaxy incorporating the latest developments in the field and the magnetorotational evolution processes. Our model considers spin-down with a force-free magnetosphere and the decay of the magnetic field strength and its inclination angle. The simulated pulsar population is fit to a large observation sample that covers the majority of radio surveys using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique. We compare the distributions of four major observables: spin period (P), spin down rate(P˙\dot{P}), dispersion measure, and radio flux density using accurate high-dimensional Kolmogoro-Smirnov statistics. We test two B-field decay scenarios, an exponential model motivated by ohmic dissipation and a power-law model motivated by the Hall effect. The former clearly provides a better fit, and it can successfully reproduce the observed pulsar distributions with a decay timescale of 8.33.0+3.98.3_{-3.0}^{+3.9} Myr. The result suggests that significant B-field decay in aged pulsars and ohmic dissipation could be the dominant process.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.14786,
  title  = {Pulsar Population Synthesis with Magnetorotational Evolution: Constraining the Decay of Magnetic field},
  author = {Zhihong Shi and C. -Y. Ng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.14786},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

17 pages, 10 figures. Published by APJ. A typo was found in Figure 7 x-axis and Table 3 in the published APJ version, we corrected that and included two addition figures for better visualization of the birth location, and core and cone model in this version