TOWARD A REALISTIC PULSAR MAGNETOSPHERE

By C. Kalapotharakos, Demosthenes Kazanas, A. Harding, I. Contopoulos. 2011

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the magnetic and electric field structures and the currents and charge densities of pulsar magnetospheres that do not obey the ideal condition, E · B = 0. Since the acceleration of particles and the production of radiation require the presence of an electric field component parallel to the magnetic field, E∥, the structure of non-ideal pulsar magnetospheres is intimately related to the production of pulsar radiation. Therefore, knowledge of the structure of non-ideal pulsar magnetospheres is important because their comparison (including models for the production of radiation) with observations will delineate the physics and the parameters underlying the pulsar radiation problem. We implement a variety of prescriptions that support non-zero values for E∥ and explore their effects on the structure of the resulting magnetospheres. We produce families of solutions that span the entire range between the vacuum and the (ideal) force-free electrodynamic solutions. We also compute the amount of dissipation as a fraction of the Poynting flux for pulsars of different angles between the rotation and magnetic axes and conclude that this is at most 20%–40% (depending on the non-ideal prescription) in the aligned rotator and 10% in the perpendicular one. We present also the limiting solutions with the property J = ρc and discuss their possible implication on the determination of the “on/off” states of the intermittent pulsars. Finally, we find that solutions with values of J greater than those needed to null E∥ locally produce oscillations, potentially observable in the data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/60ac078df7f6e48f6004e82da096a483ef8f9b80

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Citations in the corpus

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).”
Time-dependent 3D magnetohydrodynamic pulsar magnetospheres: oblique rotators (2012, background): “…resistive relativistic MHD codes should be developed (Komissarov 2007; Palenzuela et al. 2009; Dionysopoulou et al. 2012) and used to study physical resistivity effects on the structure of magnetospheric current sheets and γ -ray light curves (Kalapotharakos et al. 2012a,b; Li et al. 2012a,b).”
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).”