The annular gap model for gamma-ray emission from young and millisecond pulsars

Abstract

Pulsed high energy radiation from pulsars is not yet completely understood. In this paper, we use the 3D self-consistent annular gap model to study light curves for both young and millisecond pulsars observed by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The annular gap can generate high energy emission for short-period pulsars. The annular gap regions are so large that they have enough electric potential drop to accelerate charged particles to produce gamma-ray photons. For young pulsars, the emission region is from the neutron star surface to about half of the light cylinder radius, and the peak emissivity is in the vicinity of the null charge surface. The emission region for the millisecond pulsars is located much lower than that of the young pulsars. The higher energy gamma-ray emission comes from higher altitudes in the magnetosphere. We present the simulated light curves for three young pulsars (the Crab, the Vela, the Geminga) and three millisecond pulsars (PSR J0030+0451, PSR J0218+4232, PSR J0437-3715) using the annular gap model. Our simulations can reproduce the main properties of observed light curves.

9 pages, 3 figures and 1 table; accepted for publication in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• A NICER view of PSR J0030+0451: evidence for a global-scale multipolar magnetic field
• Constraints on the Emission Geometries and Spin Evolution of Gamma-ray Millisecond Pulsars
• Radio-to-TeV Phase-resolved Emission from the Crab Pulsar: The Annular Gap Model
• X-ray Phase-Resolved Spectroscopy of PSRs B0531+21, B1509-58, and B0540-69 with RXTE
• A broadband radio study of the average profile and giant pulses from PSR B1821-24A
• Gamma-ray Emission from the Vela Pulsar Modeled with the Annular Gap and Core Gap
• The effect of an offset polar cap dipolar magnetic field on the modeling of the Vela pulsar's $\gamma$-ray light curves
• Gamma-Ray Polarimetry of the Crab Pulsar Observed by POLAR
• Modeling Multi-wavelength Pulse Profiles of Millisecond Pulsar PSR B1821-24