The Crab pulsar at VHE

Abstract

The last six years have witnessed major revisions of our knowledge about the Crab Pulsar. The consensus scenario for the origin of the high-energy pulsed emission has been challenged with the discovery of a very-high-energy power law tail extending up to 400 GeV, above the expected spectral cut off at a few GeV. Now, new measurements obtained by the MAGIC collaboration extend the energy spectrum of the Crab Pulsar even further, on the TeV regime. Above 400 GeV the pulsed emission comes mainly from the inter-pulse, which becomes more prominent with energy due to a harder spectral index. These findings require gamma-ray production via inverse Compton scattering close to or beyond the light cylinder radius by an underlying particle population with Lorentz factors greater than 5 times 106. We will present those new results and discuss the implications in our current knowledge concerning pulsar environments.

EPJ Web of Conferences - epjconf - 'RICAP16 6th Roma International Conference on Astroparticle Physics'

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• Modeling high-energy pulsar lightcurves from first principles
• Particle acceleration in axisymmetric pulsar current sheets
• Three-dimensional numerical simulations of the pulsar magentoshere: Preliminary results
• Very high energy emission as a probe of relativistic magnetic reconnection in pulsar winds
• Three-dimensional non-vacuum pulsar outer-gap model: Localized acceleration electric field in the higher altitudes
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Detection of UHE gamma rays from the Crab Nebula: Physical Implications
• A Search for Pulsed Very High-Energy Gamma Rays from Thirteen Young Pulsars in Archival VERITAS Data
• Gamma-ray spectra of the Crab, Vela and Geminga pulsars fitted with SED of the emission from their current sheet
• Congruity of the Crab pulsar's gamma-ray spectrum with the spectral distribution of tightly focused caustics