Inductive spikes in the Crab Nebula - a theory of gamma-ray flares

Abstract

We show that the mysterious, rapidly variable emission at ~400 MeV observed from the Crab Nebula by the AGILE and Fermi experiments could be the result of a sudden drop in the mass-loading of the pulsar wind. The current required to maintain wave activity in the wind is then carried by very few particles of high Lorentz factor. On impacting the Nebula, these particles produce a tightly beamed, high luminosity burst of hard gamma-rays, similar to those observed. This implies (i) the emission is synchrotron radiation in the toroidal field of the Nebula, and, therefore, linearly polarized and (ii) this mechanism potentially contributes to the gamma-ray emission from other powerful pulsars, such as the Magellanic Cloud objects J0537-6910 and B0540-69.

5 pages, 2 figures, Supplemental material at https://www.dropbox.com/s/bqx8pn1vb7jzcs5/Supplemental.pdf?dl=0

References in corpus (8)

• Gamma-ray flares from the Crab Nebula
• Discovery of Powerful Gamma-Ray Flares from the Crab Nebula
• Pulsar Wind Nebulae in the Chandra Era
• Electrodynamics of pulsar magnetospheres
• The Crab Pulsar at Centimeter Wavelengths II: Single Pulses
• Constraints on particle acceleration sites in the Crab Nebula from relativistic MHD simulations
• Modelling Jets, Tori and Flares in Pulsar Wind Nebulae
• The e-ASTROGAM gamma-ray space mission

Cited by in corpus (7)

• A new view on Auger data and cosmogenic neutrinos in light of different nuclear disintegration and air-shower models
• Fermi-type particle acceleration from magnetic reconnection at the termination shock of a relativistic striped wind
• The implications of TeV detected GRB afterglows for acceleration at relativistic shocks
• A systematic study of $\gamma$-ray flares from the Crab Nebula with Fermi-LAT: I. flare detection
• Single Pulse Variability in Gamma-ray Pulsars
• The Crab nebula variability at short timescales with the Cherenkov Telescope Array
• A Very-High-Energy Gamma-Ray View of the Transient Sky