Related papers: Pair Multiplicities and Pulsar Death
Many pulsars exhibit a peculiar behaviour in their pulse profile of a sudden increase in their rotational period, which is popularly known as a pulsar glitch. Some of them show giant glitches with relative amplitude $\Delta\Omega/\Omega…
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…
Observations of the 5 confirmed optical pulsars indicate that the peak emission scales according to the outer field strength. We show that this gives gives further confirmation that a simple phenomenological models such as Pacini and…
Recent observations have unveiled a population of pulsars with spin periods of a few minutes to hours that lie beyond the traditional ``death line.'' If they originate from neutron stars (NSs), the existence of such ultra-long period…
Recently Beccattini and Cleymamns have proposed a model to understand the p-pbar data obtained at RHIC and SPS. We have shown that this model has a much greater applicability and can very well be used to describe the rapidity spectra of…
Observing multiphoton electron-positron pair production (the nonlinear Breit-Wheeler process) requires high-energy $\gamma$ rays to interact with strong electromagnetic fields. In order for these observations to be as precise as possible,…
We investigate the effect of pair creation on a shock structure. Actually, particles accelerated by a shock can be sufficiently energetic to boost, via Inverse Compton (IC) process for example, surrounding soft photons above the rest mass…
Based on an analysis of a specific electron trajectory in counter-propagating beams, Bell & Kirk (PRL 101, 200403 (2008)) recently suggested that laboratory lasers may shortly be able to produce significant numbers of electron-positron…
Electron-positron pair production by the superposition of two laser pulses with different frequencies and amplitudes is analyzed as a particular realization of the assisted dynamic Schwinger effect. It is demonstrated that, within a…
Synchrotron radiation of ultra-relativistic particles accelerated in a pulsar wind nebula may dominate its spectrum up to gamma-ray energies. Because of the short cooling time of the gamma-ray emitting electrons, the gamma-ray emission zone…
The status of Compton scattering by the nucleon at energies of the first and second resonance is summarized. In addition to a general test of dispersion theories and a precise determination of polarizabilities, the validities of four…
Magnetars are a subclass of neutron stars with ultra-strong surface magnetic fields. Some magnetars exhibit persistent hard X-ray emission, characterized by power-law tails with photon indices around 1--1.5, extending from ${\sim}$10 keV to…
Neutron stars (NSs) are powerful factories for new particles with masses up to the 100 keV range. These compact stars contain significant populations of charged particles, notably protons, electrons and muons. We calculate the emission…
We study the pulse morphologies and pulse amplitudes of thermally emitting neutron stars with ultrastrong magnetic fields. The beaming of the radiation emerging from a magnetar was recently shown to be predominantly non-radial, with a small…
Thermal X-ray emission from rotation-powered millisecond pulsars, shaped by gravitational lensing and the beaming of the surface radiation, provides critical insights into neutron star properties. This approach has been the focus of…
We explore the physics of relativistic radiation mediated shocks (RRMSs) in the regime where photon advection dominates over photon generation. For this purpose, a novel iterative method for deriving a self-consistent steady-state structure…
Fast shocks that form in optically thick media are mediated by Compton scattering and, if relativistic, pair creation. Since the radiation force acts primarily on electrons and positrons, the question arises of how the force is mediated to…
This paper continues a previous study of neutron stars with positive polar-cap corotational charge density in which free emission of ions maintains the surface electric-field boundary condition E.B = 0. The composition of the accelerated…
We report on an XMM-Newton observation of the accreting millisecond pulsar, IGR J17511-3057. Pulsations at 244.8339512(1) Hz are observed with an RMS pulsed fraction of 14.4(3)%. A precise solution for the P_orb=12487.51(2)s binary system…
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…