Time-dependent 3D magnetohydrodynamic pulsar magnetospheres: oblique rotators
By A. Tchekhovskoy, A. Spitkovsky, Jason G. Li. 2012
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The current state of the art in pulsar magnetosphere modeling assumes the force-free limit of magnetospheric plasma. This limit retains only partial information about plasma velocity and neglects plasma inertia and temperature. We carried out time-dependent 3D relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of oblique pulsar magnetospheres that improve upon force-free by retaining the full plasma velocity information and capturing plasma heating in strong current layers. We find rather low levels of magnetospheric dissipation, with less than 10% of pulsar spindown energy dissipated within a few light cylinder radii, and the MHD spindown that is consistent with that in force-free. While oblique magnetospheres are qualitatively similar to the rotating split-monopole force-free solution at large radii, we find substantial quantitative differences with the split-monopole, e.g., the luminosity of the pulsar wind is more equatorially concentrated than the split-monopole at high obliquities, and the flow velocity is modified by the emergence of reconnection flow directed into the current sheet.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f525574b0e82520d6ee7d9c3bdb92d1795ab181
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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).”
- Modelling high-energy pulsar light curves from first principles (2015, background): “This acceleration could be connected to the reconnection induced inflow towards the 1 However, we note that the current layer thickness decreases with strong radiative cooling (Uzdensky & McKinney 2011). sheet (Tchekhovskoy et al. 2013).”