Related papers: A Tale of Two Current Sheets
Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNe) act as calorimeters for the relativistic pair winds emanating from within the pulsar light cylinder. Their radiative dissipation in various wavebands is significantly different from that of their pulsar central…
The self-consistent two-fluid model of the pulsar magnetosphere is considered. We concentrate on the case of vanishingly small inertia of the particles. Our approach allows to obtain the realistic particle distributions sustaining the…
Magnetic reconnection, a plasma process converting magnetic energy to particle kinetic energy, is often invoked to explain magnetic energy releases powering high-energy flares in astrophysical sources including pulsar wind nebulae and black…
The main issue of the pulsar magnetosphere is how the rotation power is converted into both particle beams which causes pulsed emissions, and a highly relativistic wind of electron-positron plasmas which forms surrounding nebulae shining in…
Context. The recent discovery of much greater magnetic flux cancellation taking place at the photosphere than previously realised has led us in our previous works to suggest magnetic reconnection driven by flux cancellation as the cause of…
The radio, optical, X-ray and gamma-ray nebulae that surround many pulsars are thought to arise from synchrotron and inverse Compton emission. The energy powering this emission, as well as the magnetic fields and relativistic particles, are…
In this letter we report on turbulent acceleration of the dissipation of magnetic field in the postshock re- gion of a Poynting flux-dominated flow, such as the Crab pulsar wind nebula. We have performed two- dimensional resistive…
The recent development of numerical schemes for Relativistic MHD (RMHD) allows us to model the acceleration and outflow properties of winds from compact sources. Theoretical models suggest that acceleration and collimation of the flow are…
We present a new pulsar wind nebula (PWN) model solving both advection and diffusion of non-thermal particles in a self-consistent way to satisfy the momentum and energy conservation laws. Assuming spherically symmetric (1--D) steady…
Current closure in the pulsar magnetosphere holds the key to its structure. We must determine not only the global electric circuit, but also the source of its electric charge carriers. We address this issue with the minimum number of…
We investigate particle acceleration in an MHD-scale system of multiple current sheets by performing 2D and 3D MHD simulations combined with a test particle simulation. The system is unstable for the tearing-mode instability, and magnetic…
We continue our investigation of particle acceleration in the pulsar equatorial current sheet (ECS) that began with Contopoulos (2019) and Contopoulos & Stefanou (2019). Our basic premise has been that the charge carriers in the current…
Based on the exact dipolar solution of the pulsar equation the self-consistent two-fluid model of the pulsar magnetosphere is developed. We concentrate on the low-mass limit of the model, taking into account the radiation damping. As a…
We investigate the internal structure of the current sheet in the pulsar wind within force-free and two-fluid MHD approximations. Within the force-free approximation we obtain general asymptotic solution of the Grad-Shafranov equation for…
Pulsars, or more generally rotation powered neutron stars, are excellent factories of antimatter in the Galaxy, in the form of pairs of electrons and positrons. Electrons are initially extracted from the surface of the star by the intense…
Magnetohydrodynamical simulations are presented of a magnetized pulsar wind interacting directly with the interstellar medium, or, in the case of a surrounding supernova remnant, with the associated freely expanding ejecta of the progenitor…
We show that toroidal magnetic field annihilation in the equatorial current sheet of the pulsar magnetosphere is related to how fast poloidal magnetic field lines close as we move away from the light cylinder. This determines the…
The stationary axisymmetric force-free magnetosphere of a pulsar is considered. We present an exact dipolar solution of the pulsar equation, construct the magnetospheric model on its basis and examine its observational support. The new…
A good compromise between the resistive model and the PIC model is Aristotelian electrodynamics, which can include the back-reaction of the radiative photons onto particle motion and allow for a local dissipation where the force-free…
We investigate electron acceleration resulting from 3D magnetic reconnection between an emerging, twisted magnetic flux rope and a pre-existing weak, open magnetic field. We first follow the rise of an unstable, twisted flux tube with a…