RESISTIVE SOLUTIONS FOR PULSAR MAGNETOSPHERES

By Jason G. Li, A. Spitkovsky, A. Tchekhovskoy. 2011

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The current state of the art in the modeling of pulsar magnetospheres invokes either the vacuum or force-free limits for the magnetospheric plasma. Neither of these limits can simultaneously account for both the plasma currents and the accelerating electric fields that are needed to explain the morphology and spectra of high-energy emission from pulsars. To better understand the structure of such magnetospheres, we combine accelerating fields and force-free solutions by considering models of magnetospheres filled with resistive plasma. We formulate Ohm's law in the minimal velocity fluid frame and construct a family of resistive solutions that smoothly bridges the gap between the vacuum and the force-free magnetosphere solutions. The spin-down luminosity, open field line potential drop, and the fraction of open field lines all transition between the vacuum and force-free values as the plasma conductivity varies from zero to infinity. For fixed inclination angle, we find that the spin-down luminosity depends linearly on the open field line potential drop. We consider the implications of our resistive solutions for the spin-down of intermittent pulsars and sub-pulse drift phenomena in radio pulsars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3d127650fbf4cd528ffc3ae5195f3b48c731a550

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Citations in the corpus

Coherent emission mechanisms in astrophysical plasmas (2017, methodology): “FFE is used widely to model the global electrodynamics, particularly for the region r & rL covering the transition from the inner magnetosphere to the pulsar wind (Contopoulos et al, 1999; Gruzinov, 2005; Komissarov, 2006; Li et al, 2012b).”
THE SECOND FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE CATALOG OF GAMMA-RAY PULSARS (2013, background): “Modeling its emission drives ever-more sophisticated electrodynamic calculations (e.g. Wang & Hirotani 2011; Li et al. 2012; Kalapotharakos et al. 2012b; Pétri 2012).”
Time-dependent 3D magnetohydrodynamic pulsar magnetospheres: oblique rotators (2012, background): “As magnetospheric conductivity can vary, possibly influenced by the amount of magnetospheric plasma supply (Li, Spitkovsky & Tchekhovskoy 2012a; Li et al. 2012b), resistive relativistic MHD codes should be developed (Komissarov 2007; Palenzuela et al. 2009; Dionysopoulou et al. 2012) and used to…”
Particle acceleration in axisymmetric pulsar current sheets (2014, methodology): “& Spitkovsky 2010; Kalapotharakos et al. 2012; Pétri 2012b; Parfrey et al. 2012; Li et al. 2012; Tchekhovskoy et al. 2013), and most recently using particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations (Philippov & Spitkovsky 2014; Chen & Beloborodov 2014).”
Formation of Double Neutron Star Systems (2017, unknown): “A combined model was derived by Spitkovsky (2006) (see also Li et al. 2012) and applying his relation between B and α, Tauris et al. (2012) obtained5: B= √ c3IP Ṗ 4π2R6 1 1 + sin2 α (1) ≃ 1.3× 1019G √ PṖ ( M 1.4M⊙ )3/2√ 1 1 + sin2 α .”
Modelling high-energy pulsar light curves from first principles (2015, background): “Hence, one has to assume where non-ideal effects should occur by prescribing an arbitrary resistivity in the magnetosphere (Li et al. 2012; Kalapotharakos et al. 2012), which is not fully satisfying.”