High magnetic field pulsars and magnetars: a unified picture

Abstract

We propose a unified picture of high magnetic field radio pulsars and magnetars by arguing that they are all rotating high-field neutron stars, but have different orientations of their magnetic axes with respective to their rotation axes. In strong magnetic fields where photon splitting suppresses pair creation near the surface, the high-field pulsars can have active inner accelerators while the anomalous X-ray pulsars cannot. This can account for the very different observed emission characteristics of the anomalous X-ray pulsar 1E 2259+586 and the high field radio pulsar PSR J1814-1744. A predicted consequence of this picture is that radio pulsars having surface magnetic field greater than about $2\times 10^{14}$ G should not exist.

5 pages, emulateapj style, accepted for publication in the ApJ Letters

References in corpus (6)

• Radio Pulsar Death Line Revisited: Is PSR J2144-3933 Anomalous?
• Magnetar Spin-Down
• Full polar cap cascade scenario: $\gamma$-ray and X-ray luminosities from spin-powered pulsars
• Period clustering of the Anomalous X-ray Pulsars and magnetic field decay in magnetars
• Precision Timing of Two Anomalous X-Ray Pulsars
• X-ray observations of the high magnetic field radio pulsar PSR J1814-1744

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