Determination of the Flux-distance Relationship for Pulsars in the Parkes Multibeam Survey: Violation of the Inverse Square Law Gives Support for a New Model of Pulsar Emission

Details Determination of the Flux-distance Relationship for Pulsars in the Parkes Multibeam Survey: Violation of the Inverse Square Law Gives Support for a New Model of Pulsar Emission Determination of the Flux-distance Relationship for Pulsars in the Parkes Multibeam Survey: Violation of the Inverse Square Law Gives Support for a New Model of Pulsar Emission

Jan 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21538801s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #388.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.603

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Scientific paper

Soon after the discovery of pulsars, it was realized that their unique periodic emissions must be associated with a source that rotates. Despite this insight and forty one years of subsequent effort, a detailed understanding of the pulsar emission mechanism has proved elusive. Here, using data for 983 pulsars taken from the Parkes Multibeam Survey, we show that their fluxes at 1400 MHz (S(1400)) decay with distance d according to a non-standard power-law; we suggest that S(1400) is proportional to 1/d. This distance dependence is revealed by two independent statistical techniques, (i) the Maximum Likelihood Method and (ii) analysis of the distance evolution of the cumulative distribution functions of pulsar flux. Moreover, the derived power law is valid for both millisecond and longer-period pulsars, and is robust against possible errors in the NE2001 method for obtaining pulsar distances from dispersion measure.
This observation provides strong support for a mechanism of pulsar emission due to superluminal (faster than light in vacuo) polarization currents. Such superluminal polarization currents have been extensively studied by Bolotovskii, Ginzburg and others, who showed both that they do not violate Special Relativity (since the oppositely-charged particles that make them move relatively slowly) and that they form a bona-fide source term in Maxwell's equations.
Subsequently, emission of radiation by superluminal polarization currents was demonstrated in laboratory experiments. By extending these ideas to a superluminal polarization current whose distribution pattern follows a circular orbit, we can explain the 1/d dependence of the flux suggested by our analyses of the observational data. In addition, we show that a model of pulsar emission due to such a rotating superluminal polarization current can predict the the frequency spectrum of nine pulsars over 16 orders of magnitude of frequency quantitatively.
This work is supported by the DoE LDRD program at Los Alamos.

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