相关论文: A ring-of-fire in the pulsar magnetosphere
The present work is our first attempt to understand the role of reconnection in the pulsar magnetosphere. Our discussion is based on the observationaly infered fact that, as the pulsar spins down, the region of closed corotating dipolar…
We want to understand what drives magnetospheric dissipation in the equatorial current sheet. Numerical simulations have limitations and, unless we have a clear a priori understanding of the physical processes involved, their results can be…
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 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…
The equatorial current sheet in pulsar magnetospheres is often regarded as an ideal site for particle acceleration via relativistic reconnection. Using 2D spherical particle-in-cell simulations, we investigate particle acceleration in the…
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…
Some of the most energetic pulsars exhibit rotation-modulated gamma-ray emission in the $0.1$ to $100$ GeV band. The luminosity of this emission is typically $0.1\text{-}10\%$ of the pulsar spin-down power (gamma-ray efficiency), implying…
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…
We explore the emission properties of a dissipative pulsar magnetosphere model introduced by Kalapotharakos et al. (2014), comparing its high energy light curves and spectra, due to curvature radiation, with data collected by the Fermi LAT.…
The mechanism by which the radiation received from obliquely rotating neutron stars is generated remains an open question half a century after the discovery of pulsars. In contrast, considerable progress has recently been made in…
A good compromise between the resistive model and the PIC model is Aristotelian electrodynamics, which can include the back-reaction of the radiative photons onto particle motion and allow for a local dissipation where the force-free…
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…
Pulsar magnetospheres are filled with relativistic pairs copiously emitting photons detected from the radio wavelengths up to high and very high energies, in the GeV and sometimes in the TeV range. Efficient particle acceleration converts…
An approximate analytical solution for the rotating twisted magnetosphere of magnetars is presented. The poloidal flux is approximated by the self-similar twisted dipole field. The toroidal field is obtained by the minimum torque model.…
We investigate the strong electric current sheet that develops at the tip of the pulsar closed line region through time dependent three-dimensional numerical simulations of a rotating magnetic dipole. We show that curvature radiation from…
The magnetosphere of a rotating pulsar naturally develops a current sheet beyond the light cylinder (LC). Magnetic reconnection in this current sheet inevitably dissipates a nontrivial fraction of the pulsar spin-down power within a few LC…
Current models of gamma-ray lightcurves in pulsars suffer from large uncertainties on the precise location of particle acceleration and radiation. Here, we present an attempt to alleviate these difficulties by solving for the…
A model for slow radio pulsars is proposed which involves the entire magnetosphere in the production of the observed radio emission. It is argued that observations of pulsar profiles suggest that a feedback mechanism exists between the star…
Pulsars emit beams of radiation that reveal the extreme physics of neutron star magnetospheres. Yet, their understanding remains incomplete. Recent global Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations have raised several questions that led us to…
We present the first new type of solution of the pulsar equation since 1999. In it, the whole magnetosphere is confined inside the light cylinder and an electrically charged layer wraps around it and holds it together. The reason this new…