Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Sep 1995
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1995mnras.276..537s&link_type=abstract
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 276, Issue 2, pp. 537-548.
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
25
Acceleration Of Particles, Mhd, Pulsars: General, Galaxies: Magnetic Fields, Gamma Rays: Theory
Scientific paper
In order to explain the radio emission and wind from rotation-powered pulsars, it is conventionally supposed that field-aligned particle acceleration near the stellar surface exists and produces electron-positron pairs. However, one should note that such an `inner accelerator' - located well within the light cylinder - releases almost no angular momentum. The total angular momentum loss rate must equal the energy loss rate divided by the angular velocity of the star, implying an average location of energy loss on the light cylinder. Thus, the existence of the inner accelerator must affect electrodynamics in the outer magnetosphere around and beyond the light cylinder. The inner accelerator with a field-aligned potential drop reduces the potential difference across magnetic field lines in the outer magnetosphere, so that the outer magnetosphere is shown to radiate angular momentum efficiently to recover the unbalanced torque. Thus, the torque lever arm of the outer magnetosphere becomes effectively larger than the light radius. Correspondingly, there should appear beyond the light cylinder an extension of the closed field-line domain with subrotating charge and some current flow. It appears that field-aligned electric fields in this closed flux domain cause strong particle acceleration and gamma-ray emission. Because of the reduced transfield potential drop in the pair plasma wind, the proper strength of the current circulating in the wind is less than the Goldreich-Julian value. This mismatch will cause dissipation in the wind, which is also an origin of the hard-photon emission. We model a global magnetosphere to obtain an evolutionary curve for the pulsed radiation. The result agrees with the observation of the five known gamma-ray pulsars.
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