An empirical model for the beams of radio pulsars
arXiv:0707.2547 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2007.12237.x
Abstract
Motivated by recent results on the location of the radio emission in pulsar magnetospheres, we have developed a model which can account for the large diversity found in the average profile shapes of pulsars. At the centre of our model lies the idea that radio emission at a particular frequency arises from a wide range of altitudes above the surface of the star and that it is confined to a region close to the last open field lines. We assert that the radial height range over which emission occurs is responsible for the complex average pulse shapes rather than the transverse (longitudinal) range proposed in most current models. By implementing an abrupt change in the height range to discriminate between young, short-period, highly-energetic pulsars and their older counterparts, we obtain the observed transition between the simple and complex average pulse profiles observed in each group respectively. Monte Carlo simulations are used to demonstrate the match of our model to real observations.
Accepted for publication in MNRAS
References in corpus (5)
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- The complex polarization angles of radio pulsars: orthogonal jumps and interstellar scattering
- Mapping the magnetosphere of PSR B1055-52
- Radio polarization measurements from RRAT J1819-1458
- Detections of millisecond pulsars with the Fermi Large Area Telescope