Related papers: A new solution of the pulsar equation
In view of recent efforts to probe the physical conditions in the pulsar current sheet, we revisit the standard solution that describes the main elements of the ideal force-free pulsar magnetosphere. The simple physical requirement that the…
The pulsar magnetosphere is divided into a corotating region of closed field lines surrounded by open field lines that emanate from the two poles of the star, extend to infinity and are separated by an equatorial current sheet. The three…
All numerical solutions of the pulsar magnetosphere over the past 25 years show closed-line regions that end a significant distance inside the light cylinder, and manifest thick strongly dissipative separatrix surfaces instead of thin…
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…
The current state of the art in the modeling of pulsar magnetospheres invokes either the vacuum or force-free limits for the magnetospheric plasma. Neither of these limits can simultaneously account for both the plasma currents and the…
We present solutions of force-free pulsar magnetospheres coupled with a uniform external magnetic field aligned with the dipole magnetic moment of the pulsar. The inclusion of the uniform magnetic field has the following consequences: The…
The dipolar magnetic field structure of the neutron star is modified by the plasma originating in the pulsar magnetopshere. In the simplest case of a stationary axisymmetric force-free magnetosphere, a self-consistent description of the…
With the neutron star rotating under a stationary magnetic field generating unipolar induction, charges are driven to the pulsar surface according to their signs, and are uploaded to the magnetosphere along the magnetic field lines. In the…
(abridged) The physics of the pulsar magnetosphere remains poorly constrained by observations. Little is known about their emission mechanism. Large vacuum gaps probably exist, and a non-neutral plasma partially fills the neutron star…
The non-dissipative relativistic force-free condition should be a good approximation to describe the electromagnetic field in much of the pulsar magnetosphere, but we may plausibly expect it to break down in singular domains.…
Stationary pulsar magnetospheres in the force-free system are governed by the pulsar equation. In 1999, Contopoulos, Kazanas, and Fendt (hereafter CKF) numerically solved the pulsar equation and obtained a pulsar magnetosphere model called…
Recent advances in numerical algorithms and computational power have enabled first-principles simulations of pulsar magnetospheres using Particle-in-Cell (PIC) techniques. These ab-initio simulations seem to indicate that pair creation…
We argue that existing models of the ideal pulsar magnetosphere are incorrect because of the improper treatment of the singular current layer outside the light cylinder. We simulated the axisymmetric pulsar magnetosphere in the Force-Free…
Aims. Many recent observations of pulsars and magnetars can be interpreted in terms of neutron stars (NS) with multipole electromagnetic fields. As a first approximation, we investigate the multipole magnetic and electric fields in the…
The luminosity and structure of neutron star magnetospheres are crucial to our understanding of pulsar and plerion emission. A solution found using the force-free approximation would be an interesting standard with which any model with more…
We propose a simple analytic model for the innermost (within the light cylinder of canonical radius) structure of open-magnetic-field lines of a rotating neutron star (NS) with relativistic outflow of charged particles (electrons/positrons)…
We present first-principles relativistic particle-in-cell simulations of the oblique pulsar magnetosphere with pair formation. The magnetosphere starts to form with particles extracted from the surface of the neutron star. These particles…
We present, for the first time, the structure of the axisymmetric force-free magnetosphere of an aligned rotating magnetic dipole, in the case in which there exists a sufficiently large charge density (whose origin we do not question) to…
In this paper we present the results of time-dependent simulations of dipolar axisymmetric magnetospheres of neutron stars carried out both within the framework of relativistic magnetohydrodynamics and within the framework of resistive…
We consider a model of axisymmetric neutron star magnetosphere. In our approach, the current density in the region of open field lines is constant and the returning current flows in a narrow layer along the separatrix. In this case, the…