Related papers: Inner magnetospheric accelerators in high magnetic…
The magnetospheres of neutron stars provide a valuable testing ground for as-yet unverified theoretical predictions of quantum electrodynamics (QED) in strong electromagnetic fields. Exhibiting magnetic field strengths well in excess of a…
Over the last four decades, persistent and flaring emission of magnetars observed by various telescopes has provided us with a suite of light curves and spectra in soft and hard X-rays, with no emission yet detected above around 1 MeV.…
Magnetic photon splitting, a QED process that becomes important only in magnetic fields approaching the quantum critical value, B_cr = 4.41 X 10^13 Gauss, is investigated as a mechanism for attenuation of gamma-rays emitted near the surface…
The process of photon splitting, becomes allowed in the presence of strong magnetic field. We calculate the influence of magnetized plasma on the photon splitting absorption coefficient. We calculate the refraction coefficients and…
Magnetars are neutron stars characterized by strong surface magnetic fields generally exceeding the quantum critical value of 44.1 TeraGauss. High-energy photons propagating in their magnetospheres can be attenuated by QED processes like…
The process of photon splitting is investigated in the presence of strongly magnetized electron-positron plasma. The amplitude of the process is calculated in general case of plasma with nonzero chemical potential and temperature. The…
We calculate thermal corrections to the non-linear QED effective action for low-energy photon interactions in a background electromagnetic field. The high-temperature expansion shows that at $T \gg m$ the vacuum contribution is exactly…
The absence of radio pulsars with long periods has lead to the popular notion of a high P ``death line.'' In the standard picture, beyond this boundary, pulsars with low spin rates cannot accelerate particles above the stellar surface to…
In the hot environments of the anomalous X-ray pulsars and the soft gamma-ray repeaters, as indicated by their luminous, pulsed, quiescent X-ray emission, $\gamma$-rays generated from the inner gaps may have shorter attenuation lengths via…
The recent association of soft gamma repeaters (SGRs) with counterparts in other wavebands has sparked much interest in these sources. One of the recent models for these objects is that they originate in the environs of neutron stars with…
Gamma-rays from pulsars can be efficiently attenuated in their magnetospheres via the mechanism of single-photon pair production and also the exotic QED process of photon splitting, which become prolific in fields approaching the quantum…
We propose a unified picture of high magnetic field radio pulsars and magnetars by arguing that they are all rotating high-field neutron stars, but have different orientations of their magnetic axes with respective to their rotation axes.…
The process of photon splitting $\gamma \to \gamma \gamma$ in a strong magnetic field is investigated both below and above the pair creation threshold. Contrary to the statement by Baier et al., the ``allowed'' channel $\alw$ is shown not…
Neutron stars have inferred surface magnetic fields of up to 10^{14} Gauss, in the case of radio pulsars, and up to possibly 10^{15} Gauss, in the case of Soft Gamma-Ray Repeaters and Anomalous X-ray Pulsars. In fields this high, QED…
We discuss the polarization selection rules for splitting of the two principal electromagnetic modes that propagate in a vacuum polarized by a superstrong magnetic field (B>0.1B_{cr} ~ 4x10^{12} G). We show that below the threshold of free…
We evaluate several basic electrodynamic processes as modified by the presence of a very strong magnetic field, exceeding $B_{\rm Q} \equiv m^2/e = 4.4\times 10^{13}$ G. These results are needed to build models of dissipative phenomena…
Photon-photon scattering, due to photons interacting with virtual electron-positron pairs, is an intriguing deviation from classical electromagnetism predicted by quantum electrodynamics (QED). Apart from being of fundamental interest in…
We study the processes of photon-photon scattering and photon splitting in a magnetic field in Born-Infeld theory. In both cases we combine the terms from the tree-level Born-Infeld Lagrangian with the usual one-loop QED contributions,…
We consider the details of the QED processes that create electron-positron pairs in magnetic fields approaching and exceeding 10^{14} G. The formation of free and bound pairs is addressed, and the importance of positronium dissociation by…
We consider the electron-positron plasma generation processes in the magnetospheres of magnetars - neutron stars with strong surface magnetic fields, B = 10^(14) - 10^(15) G. We show that the photon splitting in a magnetic field, which is…