Related papers: The Role of Superluminal Electromagnetic Waves in …
Pulsar winds are the ideal environment for the study of non-linear electromagnetic waves. It is generally thought that a pulsar launches a striped wind, a magnetohydrodynamic entropy wave, where plasma sheets carried along with the flow…
The termination shock of a pulsar wind is located roughly where the ram pressure matches that of the surrounding medium. Downstream of the shock, MHD models of the diffuse nebular emission suggest the plasma is weakly magnetized. However,…
The energy lost by a rotation-powered pulsar is carried by a relativistic flow containing a mixture of electromagnetic fields and particles. In the inner regions, this is thought to be a magnetically dominated, cold, electron-positron wind…
Pulsar wind nebulae are efficient particle accelerators, and yet the processes at work remain elusive. Self-generated, microturbulence is too weak in relativistic magnetized shocks to accelerate particles over a wide energy range,…
Nonlinear electromagnetic waves with superluminal phase velocity can propagate in the winds around isolated pulsars, and around some pulsars in binary systems. Using a short-wavelength approximation, we find and analyze an integrable system…
We present a scenario that could explain non-thermal particle acceleration in relativistic quasi-perpendicular electron-positron shocks, such as the termination shock of pulsar wind nebulae. The shock produces a strong electromagnetic…
Flows in which energy is transported predominantly as Poynting flux are thought to occur in pulsars, gamma-ray bursts and relativistic jets from compact objects. The fluctuating component of the magnetic field in such a flow can in…
Recent work on the properties of superluminal waves in pulsar winds is summarized. It is speculated that these waves play an important role in the termination shock that divides the wind from the surrounding nebula.
We present first results of three dimensional relativistic magnetohydrodynamical simulations of Pulsar Wind Nebulae. They show that the kink instability and magnetic dissipation inside these nebulae may be the key processes allowing to…
Unpulsed, high-energy emission from pulsar binaries can be attributed to the interaction of a pulsar wind with that of a companion star. At the shock between the outflows, particles carried away from the pulsar magnetosphere are accelerated…
Fast magnetosonic waves in a magnetically-dominated plasma are investigated. In the pulsar wind, these waves may transport a significant fraction of the energy flux. It is shown that the nonlinear steepening and subsequent formation of…
Charged particles interacting with electromagnetic waves have a portion of their energy tied up in wave-driven oscillations. When these waves are localized to the exhaust of linear magnetic confinement systems this ponderomotive effect can…
The author presents a model for variability of the flux and polarization of blazars in which turbulent plasma flowing at a relativistic speed down a jet crosses a standing conical shock. The shock compresses the plasma and accelerates…
We report the results of 1D particle-in-cell simulations of ultrarelativistic shock waves in proton-electron-positron plasmas. We consider magnetized shock waves, in which the upstream medium carries a large scale magnetic field, directed…
The dynamics of relativistic magnetized mass loaded outflows carrying toroidal magnetic field is analyzed in the context of Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNs). Mass loading is very efficient in slowing down super-relativistic magnetized flows and…
The recently discovered gamma-ray flares from the Crab nebula are generally attributed to the magnetic energy release in a highly magnetized region within the nebula. I argue that such a region naturally arises in the polar region of the…
A 2.5-dimensional particle-in-cell code is used to investigate the propagation of a large-amplitude, superluminal, nearly transverse electromagnetic (TEM) wave in a relativistically streaming electron-positron plasma with and without a…
We calculate the structure of a relativistic shock wave in which the internal energy of the shocked fluid is radiated away on a time scale much shorter than the characteristic shock propagation time. The shock is assumed to move through a…
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…
As a shock front interacts with turbulence, it develops corrugation which induces outgoing wave modes in the downstream plasma. For a fast shock wave, the incoming wave modes can either be fast magnetosonic waves originating from…