Abstract
Almost 50 years after radio pulsars were discovered in 1967, our understanding of these objects remains incomplete. On the one hand, within a few years it became clear that neutron star rotation gives rise to the extremely stable sequence of radio pulses, that the kinetic energy of rotation provides the reservoir of energy, and that electromagnetic fields are the braking mechanism. On the other hand, no consensus regarding the mechanism of coherent radio emission or the conversion of electromagnetic energy to particle energy yet exists. In this review, we report on three aspects of pulsar structure that have seen recent progress: the self-consistent theory of the magnetosphere of an oblique magnetic rotator; the location, geometry, and optics of radio emission; and evolution of the angle between spin and magnetic axes. These allow us to take the next step in understanding the physical nature of the pulsar activity.
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Notes
See ATNF catalog: http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/pulsar/psrcat/.
This relation coincides exactly with one obtained by Beskin et al. (1993) analytically.
Narayan and Vivekanand (1983) suggest that pulsar beams are, instead, elongated; and that their elongation decreases as the pulsar ages.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the International Space Science Institute for its hospitality. V. Beskin and S. Chernov were supported by Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project N 14-02-00831) C.R. Gwinn acknowledges support of the US National Science Foundation (AST-1008865). A. Tchekhovskoy was supported by NASA through Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship grant number PF3-140131 awarded by the Chandra X-ray Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for NASA under contract NAS8-03060, and NASA via High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center that provided access to the Pleiades supercomputer, as well as NSF through an XSEDE computational time allocation TG-AST100040 on NICS Kraken, Nautilus, TACC Stampede, Maverick, and Ranch.
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Beskin, V.S., Chernov, S.V., Gwinn, C.R. et al. Radio Pulsars. Space Sci Rev 191, 207–237 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-015-0173-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-015-0173-8