Pulsar Wind Nebulae Modeling

Abstract

Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNe) are ideal astrophysical laboratories where high energy relativistic phenomena can be investigated. They are close, well resolved in our observations, and the knowledge derived in their study has a strong impact in many other fields, from AGNs to GRBs. Yet there are still unresolved issues, that prevent us from a full clear understanding of these objects. The lucky combination of high resolution X-ray imaging and numerical codes to handle the outflow and dynamical properties of relativistic MHD, has opened a new avenue of investigation that has lead to interesting progresses in the last years. Despite all of this, we do not understand yet how particles are accelerated, and the functioning of the pulsar wind and pulsar magnetosphere, that power PWNe. I will review what is now commonly known as the MHD paradigm, and in particular I will focus on various approaches that have been and are currently used to model these systems. For each I will highlight its advantages, limitations, and degree of applicability.

10 pages, Invited Review Talk at the HEPRO IV Confernce, Heidelberg, Germany. To be published in International Journal of Modern Physics. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1311.5783

References in corpus (11)

• A Dynamical Model for the Evolution of a Pulsar Wind Nebula inside a Non-Radiative Supernova Remnant
• Relativistic MHD Winds from Rotating Neutron Stars
• Simulated synchrotron emission from Pulsar Wind Nebulae
• Modeling interaction of relativistic and nonrelativistic winds in binary system PSR 1259-63/SS2883. I.Hydrodynamical limit
• Relativistic Jets and Long-Duration Gamma-ray Bursts from the Birth of Magnetars
• Heating and Non-thermal Particle Acceleration in Relativistic, Transverse Magnetosonic Shock Waves in Proton-Electron-Positron Plasmas
• Particle acceleration in the driven relativistic reconnection
• Non-thermal emission from relativistic MHD simulations of PWNe: from synchrotron to inverse Compton
• X-ray Observations of Parsec-Scale Tails behind Two Middle-Aged Pulsars
• Three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of asymmetric pulsar wind bow shocks
• Local Kelvin-Helmholtz instability and synchrotron modulation in Pulsar Wind Nebulae

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Pulsar-Wind Nebulae: Recent Progress in Observations and Theory
• Gamma-ray pulsars: a gold mine
• Thermal absorption as the cause of gigahertz-peaked spectra in pulsars and magnetars
• Spatially-Dependent Modelling of Pulsar Wind Nebula G0.9+0.1
• Multidimensional relativistic MHD simulations of Pulsar Wind Nebulae: dynamics and emission
• Exploiting Morphological Data from Pulsar Wind Nebulae via a Spatio-Temporal Leptonic Transport Code
• Simultaneous Fitting of the Spectral Energy Density, Energy-dependent Size, and X-ray Spectral Index vs. Radius of The Young Pulsar Wind Nebula PWN G0.9+0.1
• Simultaneous Spectral and Spatial Modelling of Young Pulsar Wind Nebulae