Related papers: Particle Acceleration in Pair-Starved Pulsars
We investigate a stationary pair production cascade in the outer magnetosphere of an isolated, spinning neutron star. The charge depletion due to global flows of charged particles, causes a large electric field along the magnetic field…
We investigate the electrostatic acceleration of electrons and positrons in the vicinity of the event horizon, applying the pulsar outer-gap model to black hole magnetospheres. During a low accretion phase, the radiatively inefficient…
The study of pulsars in the three and a half decades since their discovery has highlighted a handful of issues critical to their understanding. To date there is no consensus on the physical mechanism for their radio radio emission, despite…
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…
Recent $\gamma$-ray observations suggest that the particle acceleration occurs at the outer region of the pulsar magnetosphere. The magnetic field lines in the outer acceleration region (OAR) are connected to the neutron star surface (NSS).…
The electric field accelerating electrons in the Timokhin-Arons polar-cap model as applied to millisecond pulsars is so high that the electron Lorentz factors are limited either by radiation reaction or by the Breit-Wheeler process. In the…
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…
The expansion of a charge-neutral cloud of electrons and positrons with the temperature 1 MeV into an unmagnetized ambient plasma is examined with a 2D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. The pair outflow drives solitary waves in the ambient…
Pulsar radio emission is believed to be originated from the electron-positron pairs streaming out from the polar cap region. Pair formation, an essential condition for pulsar radio emission, is believed to be sustained in active pulsars via…
A synthesis of the present knowledge on gamma-ray emission from the magnetosphere of a rapidly rotating neutron star is presented, focusing on the electrodynamics of particle accelerators. The combined curvature, synchrotron, and…
I summarize the theory of acceleration of non-neutral particle beams by starvation electric fields along the polar magnetic field lines of rotation powered pulsars, including the effect of dragging of inertial frames which dominates the…
Pair cascades from millisecond pulsars (MSPs) may be a primary source of Galactic electrons and positrons that contribute to the increase in positron flux above 10 GeV as observed by PAMELA and AMS-02. The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT)…
In this paper, we discuss the results of a new particle pusher in realistic ultra-strong electromagnetic fields as those encountered around rotating neutron stars. After presenting results of this algorithm in simple fields and comparing…
Electron-positron pair creation due to combined nuclear Coulomb and strong laser fields is investigated for the tunneling regime. The energy spectra and angular distributions of the pair are found analytically for the first time. The energy…
A new method for determining the accelerating potential above the polar caps of radio pulsars with an arbitrary inclination angle of the magnetic axis to the rotation axis has been proposed. The approach has been based on the concept of a…
Using an analytic, axisymmetric approach that includes general relativity, coupled to a condition for pair production deduced from simulations, we derive general results about the spatial distribution of pair-producing field lines over the…
A time-dependent model for pair creation in a pulsar magnetosphere is developed. It is argued that the parallel electric field that develops in a charge-starved region (a gap) of a pulsar magnetosphere oscillates with large amplitude.…
We study the acceleration of charged particles by ultra-relativistic shocks using test-particle Monte-Carlo simulations. Two field configurations are considered: (i) shocks with uniform upstream magnetic field in the plane of the shock, and…
Expanding on the comment by Lyne et al (2017), that intermittent pulsars tend to congregate near a stripe in the logarithmic period versus period-derivative diagram, representing a small range of polar cap electric potential, as well as the…
Motivated by the particle acceleration problem in pulsars, we numerically investigate electrostatic instability of electron-positron pairs injected in an external electric field. The electric field is expected to be so strong that we cannot…