Reconnection in a Striped Pulsar Wind

By Y. Lyubarsky, John G. Kirk. 2000

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is generally thought that most of the spin-down power of a pulsar is carried away in an MHD wind dominated by Poynting flux. In the case of an oblique rotator, a significant part of this energy can be considered to be in a low-frequency wave, consisting of stripes of a toroidal magnetic field of alternating polarity propagating in a region around the equatorial plane. Magnetic reconnection in such a structure has been proposed as a mechanism for transforming the Poynting flux into particle energy in the pulsar wind. We have reexamined this process and conclude that the wind accelerates significantly in the course of reconnection. This dilates the timescale over which the reconnection process operates so that the wind requires a much larger distance than was previously thought in order to convert the Poynting flux to particle flux. In the case of the Crab pulsar, the wind is still Poynting-dominated at the radius at which a standing shock is inferred from observation. An estimate of the radius of the termination shock for other pulsars implies that all except the millisecond pulsars have Poynting flux-dominated winds all the way out to the shock front.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/332b0faf4f6ce8522aa58f688dd1c5099c37a1a7

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Citations in the corpus

Ab-initio Pulsar Magnetosphere: Particle Acceleration in Oblique Rotators and High-energy Emission Modeling (2017, background): “Since conditions at the base of the wind are now understood, the long-standing problem of whether the striped pattern of the pulsar wind survives until the termination shock (Usov 1975; Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001; Arons 2012) can now be addressed.”
A model for fast extragalactic radio bursts (2014, background): “(32) The wind could be accelerated further out due to dissipation of alternating magnetic fields (Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001; Kirk & Skjæraasen 2003).”
Blast Waves from Magnetar Flares and Fast Radio Bursts (2019, background): “The released heat tends to accelerate the equatorial wind (Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001; Drenkhahn & Spruit 2002), although recent numerical simulations (Zrake 2016; Cerutti & Philippov 2017) suggest a more complicated picture of current sheet dissipation.”
Prompt GRB emission from gradual energy dissipation (2007, methodology): “This model has been further developed to include special relativistic effects and different reconnection prescriptions (Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001; DS02; Kirk & Skjæraasen 2003).”
ACCELERATION OF PARTICLES AT THE TERMINATION SHOCK OF A RELATIVISTIC STRIPED WIND (2011, methodology): “We choose η = 3, motivated by analytical studies of pulsar winds (Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001).”
Relativistic Shocks: Particle Acceleration and Magnetization (2015, background): “ternating stripes will dissipate their energy into particle heat ahead of the termination shock, or whether the wind remains dominated by Poynting flux till the termination shock (Lyubarsky and Kirk 2001; Kirk and Skjæraasen 2003; Sironi and Spitkovsky 2011a).”
The role of kink instability in Poynting-flux dominated jets (2006, result): “These results have been compared with those that are predicted by other dissipative models (Coroniti 1990; Spruit et al. 2001; Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001; Drenkhahn 2002; Drenkhahn & Spruit 2002).”
On the relativistic magnetic reconnection (2005, background): “In pulsars, the relativistic magnetic reconnection was proposed as a source of the high-energy emission (Lyubarskii 1996; Kirk, Skjæraasen & Gallant 2002) and as the solution to the σ-problem (Coroniti 1990; Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001; Kirk & Skjæraasen 2003; Lyubarsky 2003).”
ASYMPTOTIC STRUCTURE OF POYNTING-DOMINATED JETS (2009, background): “On the other hand, such a flow could be accelerated further when and if the Poynting flux is dissipated (Thompson 1994; Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001; Drenkhahn 2002; Drenkhahn & Spruit 2002; Kirk & Skjæraasen 2003).”
Pulsar Wind Nebulae as Cosmic Pevatrons: A Current Sheet’s Tale (2012, background): “…the flow time to the termination shock RT S/c, therefore Γwind √ (RT S/πRL)(vs/c) = 5 × 104√vs/c (Crab) must be satisfied if Coroniti’s model is to be viable—see Lyubarsky and Kirk (2001), Kirk and Skjæraasen (2003) and Arons (2008) for models with greater or lesser detail that address this…”
The Sigma Problem of the Crab Pulsar Wind (2003, methodology): “The approach of Lyubarsky & Kirk (2001) and Kirk & Skjæraasen (2003) is based on computing the slow evolution of an entropy wave as it is convected outwards by the stellar wind.”
PARTICLE ACCELERATION IN RELATIVISTIC MAGNETIZED COLLISIONLESS PAIR SHOCKS: DEPENDENCE OF SHOCK ACCELERATION ON MAGNETIC OBLIQUITY (2009, background): “…field, and the field may dissipate via magnetic reconnection of the opposite polarity stripes before the termination shock (Coroniti 1990; Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001); the effective magnetization of the shock would then be lower and particle acceleration would proceed like in an essentially…”
Particle Acceleration and Magnetic Dissipation in Relativistic Current Sheet of Pair Plasmas (2007, methodology): “Based on this idea, magnetic dissipation in the pulsar wind has been estimated by using a one-dimensional MHDmodel (Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001; Kirk & Skjæraasen 2003), but they were not so successful.”
Plasmoids in relativistic reconnection, from birth to adulthood: first they grow, then they go (2016, background): “Alternatively, the outflow may contain current sheets from its base,s it is the case in pulsar winds, if the pulsar rotational and magnetic axes are not aligned (Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001).”
An Analysis of Gamma-Ray Burst Spectral Break Models (2002, background): “In princi- ple σ decreases with increasing radius due to conversion of part of the Poynting flux into the kinetic energy, especially when magnetic reconnection is operating, though the effect is likely not to be large (Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001; Contopoulos & Kazanas 2002).”
The Astrophysics of Ultrahigh-Energy Cosmic Rays (2011, background): “…responsible for the generation of high energy particles in solar flares, has been applied to UHECR acceleration in pulsar winds (Coroniti 1990; Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001), in newborn millisecond pulsars (de Gouveia Dal Pino & Lazarian 2000), in termination shocks of pulsar winds (Lyubarsky 2003),…”
RELATIVISTIC RECONNECTION: AN EFFICIENT SOURCE OF NON-THERMAL PARTICLES (2014, background): “…reconnection is often invoked as a source of the accelerated particles required to explain the non-thermal signatures of pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe; Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001; Lyubarsky 2003; Kirk & Skjæraasen 2003; Pétri & Lyubarsky 2007), jets from active galactic nuclei (AGNs; Romanova & Lovelace…”
The Proto-Magnetar Model for Gamma-Ray Bursts (2010, background): “Similar physics occurs in the wind from the Crab Pulsar, for which the very high initial magnetization may prevent internal dissipation prior to the wind termination shock at R ∼ 1017 cm (Kennel & Coroniti 1984; Lyubarsky & Kirk 2001).”