Journal ArticleDOI
Reconnection in a striped pulsar wind
Yuri Lyubarsky,John G. Kirk +1 more
TLDR
In this paper, it was shown that the wind accelerates significantly in the course of reconnection, which dilates the timescale over which the reconnection process operates, and requires a much larger distance than was previously thought to convert the Poynting flux to particle flux.Abstract:
It is generally thought that most of the spin-down power of a pulsar is carried away in an MHD wind dominated by Poynting flux. In the case of an oblique rotator, a significant part of this energy can be considered to be in a low-frequency wave, consisting of stripes of a toroidal magnetic field of alternating polarity propagating in a region around the equatorial plane. Magnetic reconnection in such a structure has been proposed as a mechanism for transforming the Poynting flux into particle energy in the pulsar wind. We have reexamined this process and conclude that the wind accelerates significantly in the course of reconnection. This dilates the timescale over which the reconnection process operates so that the wind requires a much larger distance than was previously thought in order to convert the Poynting flux to particle flux. In the case of the Crab pulsar, the wind is still Poynting-dominated at the radius at which a standing shock is inferred from observation. An estimate of the radius of the termination shock for other pulsars implies that all except the millisecond pulsars have Poynting flux-dominated winds all the way out to the shock front.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Relativistic reconnection: an efficient source of non-thermal particles
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated anti-parallel reconnection in magnetically dominated electron-positron plasmas and proved that the late-time particle spectrum integrated over the whole reconnection region is a power law whose slope is harder than −2 for magnetizations σ 10.
Journal ArticleDOI
The protomagnetar model for gamma-ray bursts
TL;DR: In this paper, a self-consistent model that directly connects the properties of the central engine to the observed prompt emission was proposed, which predicts a relatively constant 'Band' spectral peak energy E peak with time during the gamma-ray burst.
Journal ArticleDOI
Magnetic Reconnection in Astrophysical and Laboratory Plasmas
Ellen G. Zweibel,Masaaki Yamada +1 more
TL;DR: Magnetic reconnection is a topological rearrangement of magnetic field that converts magnetic energy to plasma energy as discussed by the authors, which is essential for dynamos and the large-scale restructuring known as magnetic self-organization.
Journal ArticleDOI
Efficient acceleration and radiation in Poynting flux powered GRB outflows
G. Drenkhahn,Henk C. Spruit +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the effect of local magnetic dissipation processes in Poynting flux-powered GRBs and found that for typical GRB parameters (energy and baryon loading) the dissipation takes place mainly outside the pho-tosphere, producing non-thermal radiation.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Astrophysics of Ultrahigh-Energy Cosmic Rays
Kumiko Kotera,Angela V. Olinto +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the main effects of propagation from cosmologically distant sources, including interactions with cosmic background radiation and magnetic fields, are discussed, leading to a survey of candidate sources and their signatures.
References
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Book
Perturbation Methods
Ali H. Nayfeh,Vimal Singh +1 more
TL;DR: This website becomes a very available place to look for countless perturbation methods sources and sources about the books from countries in the world are provided.
Journal ArticleDOI
Millisecond pulsars with extremely strong magnetic fields as a cosmological source of γ-ray bursts
TL;DR: In this article, a new model for γ-ray bursts at cosmological distances was proposed, based on the formation of rapidly rotating neutron stars with surface magnetic fields of the order of 1015.
Journal ArticleDOI
Confinement of the Crab pulsar's wind by its supernova remnant
TL;DR: In this article, a steady state, spherically symmetric, magnetohydrodynamic model of the Crab nebula is constructed, where a highly relativistic positronic positronic pulsar wind is terminated by a strong MHD shock that decelerates the flow and increases its pressure to match boundary conditions imposed by the recently discovered supernova remnant that surrounds the nebula.
Journal ArticleDOI
Theory of pulsar magnetospheres
TL;DR: In this article, a wide range of fundamental physical problems directly related to how pulsars function are discussed, some of which are independent of the specific pulsar mechanism and others relate directly to the physics of the pulsar and already shed some light on the properties of matter at high density and in strong magnetic fields.
Related Papers (5)
Magnetically Striped Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Winds: The Crab Nebula Revisited
Confinement of the Crab pulsar's wind by its supernova remnant
The Origin of the Magnetic Field and Relativistic Particles in the Crab Nebula
M. J. Rees,James E. Gunn +1 more