Pulsar Emission Physics: The First Fifty Years

Abstract

Over the last fifty years since the discovery of pulsars, our understanding of where and how pulsars emit the radiation we observe has undergone significant revision. The location and mechanisms of high-energy radiation are intimately tied to the sites of particle acceleration. The evolution of emission models has paralleled the development of increasingly more sensitive telescopes, especially at high energies. I will review the history of pulsar emission modeling, from the early days of gaps at the polar caps, to outer gaps and slot gaps in the outer magnetosphere, to the present era of global magnetosphere simulations that locate most acceleration and high- energy emission in the current sheets.

6 pages, 1 figure, to be published in proceedings of IAU Symposium 337 "Pulsar Astrophysics: The Next Fifty Years"

References in corpus (9)

• Time-dependent pair cascades in magnetospheres of neutron stars I. Dynamics of the polar cap cascade with no particle supply from the neutron star surface
• Ab-initio pulsar magnetosphere: three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations of oblique pulsars
• Modeling high-energy pulsar lightcurves from first principles
• Particle acceleration in axisymmetric pulsar current sheets
• Electrodynamics of axisymmetric pulsar magnetosphere with electron-positron discharge: a numerical experiment
• High-Altitude Emission from Pulsar Slot Gaps: The Crab Pulsar
• On the polar cap cascade pair multiplicity of young pulsars
• Electrodynamics of pulsar magnetospheres
• Testing dissipative magnetosphere model light curves and spectra with FERMI pulsars

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Radio Pulsar Beam Geometry at Lower Frequencies: Bright Sources Outside the Arecibo Sky
• Insight-HXMT observations of the Crab pulsar
• Spin-flavor oscillations of Dirac neutrinos in a plane electromagnetic wave
• Phase-resolved gamma-ray spectroscopy of the Crab pulsar observed by POLAR
• A renewed search for radio emission from the variable $\gamma$-ray pulsar PSR J2021$+$4026
• Multi-wavelength emission in resistive pulsar magnetospheres