Electric field screening in pair discharges and generation of pulsar radio emission
arXiv:2202.01303 · doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ac7c71
Abstract
Pulsar radio emission may be generated in pair discharges which fill the pulsar magnetosphere with plasma as an accelerating electric field is screened by freshly created pairs. In this Letter we develop a simplified analytic theory for the screening of the electric field in these pair discharges and use it to estimate total radio luminosity and spectrum. The discharge has three stages. First, the electric field is screened for the first time and starts to oscillate. Next, a nonlinear phase occurs. In this phase, the amplitude of the electric field experiences strong damping because the field dramatically changes the momenta of newly created pairs. This strong damping ceases, and the system enters a final linear phase, when the electric field can no longer dramatically change pair momenta. Applied to pulsars, this theory may explain several aspects of radio emission, including the observed luminosity, , and the observed spectrum, .
arXiv commentUpdated to accepted version
References in corpus (19)
- Time-dependent force-free pulsar magnetospheres: axisymmetric and oblique rotators
- Current Flow and Pair Creation at Low Altitude in Rotation Powered Pulsars' Force-Free Magnetospheres: Space-Charge Limited Flow
- The pulsar spectral index distribution
- 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
- On the polar cap cascade pair multiplicity of young pulsars
- Origin of Pulsar Radio Emission
- On the maximum pair multiplicity of pulsar cascades
- Large-Amplitude, Pair-Creating Oscillations in Pulsar and Black Hole Magnetospheres
- Wide-Band, Low-Frequency Pulse Profiles of 100 Radio Pulsars with LOFAR
- Polar-cap accelerator and radio emission from pulsars
- Pair Creation in the Pulsar Magnetosphere
- Radio efficiency of pulsars
- Pulsar radio emission mechanisms: a critique
- Kinetic model of large-amplitude oscillations in neutron star pair cascades
- Magnetospheric return-current-heated atmospheres of rotation-powered millisecond pulsars
- A rotation-driven pulsar radio emission mechanism
- Wave dispersion in pulsar plasma: 3. Beam-driven instabilities
- Luminosity of radio pulsar and its new emission death line
- Kinetic instability in inductively oscillatory plasma equilibrium