Effects of Rotation and Relativistic Charge Flow on Pulsar Magnetospheric Structure

Abstract

We propose an analytical 3-D model of the open field-line region of a neutron star (NS) magnetosphere. We construct an explicit analytic solution for arbitrary obliquity (angle between the rotation and magnetic axes) incorporating the effects of magnetospheric rotation, relativistic flow of charges (e.g. primary electron beam) along the open field lines, and E X B drift of these charges. Our solution employs the space-charge-limited longitudinal current calculated in the electrodynamic model of Muslimov & Tsygan (1992) and is valid up to very high altitudes nearly approaching the light cylinder. We assume that in the innermost magnetosphere, the NS magnetic field can be well represented by a static magnetic dipole configuration. At high altitudes the open magnetic field lines significantly deviate from those of a static dipole and tend to focus into a cylindrical bundle, swept back in the direction opposite to the rotation, and also bent towards the rotational equator. We briefly discuss some implications of our study to spin-powered pulsars.

24 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (5)

• High-Altitude Particle Acceleration and Radiation in Pulsar Slot Gaps
• Rotational sweepback of magnetic field lines in geometrical models of pulsar radio emission
• An Idealized Pulsar Magnetosphere: the Relativistic Force-Free Approximation
• Particle Acceleration in Pair-Starved Pulsars
• A model for the flaring radio emission in the double pulsar system J0737-3039

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Three-dimensional numerical simulations of the pulsar magentoshere: Preliminary results
• The pulsar force-free magnetosphere linked to its striped wind: time-dependent pseudo-spectral simulations
• Theory of pulsar magnetosphere and wind
• Particle Accelerator in Pulsar Magnetospheres: Super Goldreich-Julian Current with Ion Emission from the Neutron Star Surface
• Pulse Profiles, Spectra and Polarization Characteristics of Non-Thermal Emissions from the Crab-Like Pulsars
• Polarization of high-energy emissions from the Crab pulsar
• The annular gap model for gamma-ray emission from young and millisecond pulsars
• Pair-Starved Pulsar Magnetospheres
• Non-thermal emissions from outer magnetospheric accelerators of middle-aged pulsars
• The pulsar gamma-ray emission from the high-resolution dissipative magnetospheres