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Register a new userNew mechanism of pulsar radio emission
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It is shown that pulsar radio emission can be generated effectively through a streaming motion in the polar-cap regions of a pulsar magnetosphere causing nonresonant growth of waves that can escape directly. As in other beam models, a relatively low-energy high-density beam is required. The instability generates quasi-transverse waves in a beam mode at frequencies that can be well below the resonant frequency. As the waves propagate outward growth continues until the height at which the wave frequency is equal to the resonant frequency. Beyond this point the waves escape in a natural plasma mode (L-O mode). This one-step mechanism is much more efficient than previously widely considered multi-step mechanisms.
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In this Letter we propose that coherent radio emission of Crab, other young energetic pulsars, and millisecond pulsars is produced in the magnetospheric current sheet beyond the light cylinder. We carry out global and local two-dimensional kinetic plasma simulations of reconnection to illustrate the coherent emission mechanism. Reconnection in the current sheet beyond the light cylinder proceeds in the very efficient plasmoid-dominated regime, and current layer gets fragmented into a dynamic chain of plasmoids which undergo successive coalescence. Mergers of sufficiently large plasmoids produce secondary perpendicular current sheets, which are also plasmoid-unstable. Collisions of plasmoids with each other and with the upstream magnetic field eject fast-magnetosonic waves, which propagate upstream across the background field and successfully escape from the plasma as electromagnetic waves that fall in the radio band. This model successfully explains many important features of the observed radio emission from Crab and other pulsars with high magnetic field at the light cylinder: phase coincidence with the high-energy emission, nano-second duration (nanoshots), and extreme instantaneous brightness of individual pulses.
We investigated the pulsar radio luminosity ($L$), emission efficiency (ratio of radio luminosity to its spin-down power $dot{E}$), and death line in the diagram of magnetic field (B) versus spin period (P), and found that the dependence of pulsar radio luminosity on its spin-down power ($L-dot{E}$) is very weak, shown as $Lsimdot{E}^{0.06}$, which deduces an equivalent inverse correlation between emission efficiency and spin-down power as $xisim dot{E}^{-0.94}$. Furthermore, we examined the distributions of radio luminosity of millisecond and normal pulsars, and found that, for the similar spin-down powers, the radio luminosity of millisecond pulsars is about one order of magnitude lower than that of the normal pulsars. The analysis of pulsar radio flux suggests that this correlations are not due to a selective effect, but are intrinsic to the pulsar radio emission physics. Their radio radiations may be dominated by the different radiation mechanisms. The cut-off phenomenon of currently observed radio pulsars in B-P diagram is usually referred as the pulsar death line, which corresponds to $dot{E}approx 10^{30}$ erg/s and is obtained by the cut-off voltage of electron acceleration gap in the polar cap model of pulsar proposed by Ruderman and Sutherland. Observationally, this death line can be inferred by the actual observed pulsar flux $Sapprox $1mJy and 1kpc distance, together with the maximum radio emission efficiency of 1%. At present, the actual observed pulsar flux can reach 0.01mJy by FAST telescope, which will arise the observational limit of spin-down power of pulsar as low as $dot{E}approx 10^28$ erg/s. This means that the new death line is downward shifted two orders of magnitude, which might be favorably referred as the observational limit-line, and accordingly the pulsar theoretical model for the cut-off voltage of gap should be heavily modified.
Since pulsars were discovered as emitters of bright coherent radio emission more than half a century ago, the cause of the emission has remained a mystery. In this Letter we demonstrate that coherent radiation can be directly generated in non-stationary pair plasma discharges which are responsible for filling the pulsar magnetosphere with plasma. By means of large-scale two-dimensional kinetic plasma simulations, we show that if pair creation is non-uniform across magnetic field lines, the screening of electric field by freshly produced pair plasma is accompanied by the emission of waves which are electromagnetic in nature. Using localized simulations of the screening process, we identify these waves as superluminal ordinary (O) modes, which should freely escape from the magnetosphere as the plasma density drops along the wave path. The spectrum of the waves is broadband and the frequency range is comparable to that of observed pulsar radio emission.
Observations suggest that in normal period radio pulsars, coherent curvature radiation is excited within 10$%$ of the light cylinder. The coherence is attributed to Langmuir mode instability in a relativistically streaming one-dimensional plasma flow along the open magnetic field lines. In this work, we use a hot plasma treatment to solve the hydrodynamic dispersion relation of Langmuir mode for realistic pulsar parameters. The solution involves three scenarios of two-stream instability viz., driven by high energy beams, due to longitudinal drift that leads to a separation of electron-positron distribution functions in the secondary plasma and due to cloud-cloud interaction causing spatial overlap of two successive secondary plasma clouds. We find that sufficient amplification can be obtained only for the latter two scenarios. Our analysis shows that longitudinal drift is characterized by high growth rates only for certain multi-polar surface field geometry. For these configurations, very high growth rates are obtained starting from a few tens of km from the neutron star surface, which then falls monotonically with increasing distance. For cloud-cloud overlap, growth rates become high starting only after a few hundred km from the surface, which first increases and then decreases with increasing distance. A spatial window of up to around a 1000 km above the neutron star surface has been found where large amplitude Langmuir waves can be excited while the pair plasma is dense enough to account for high brightness temperature.
The computational cost of searching for new pulsars is a limiting factor for upcoming radio telescopes such as SKA. We introduce four new algorithms: an optimal constant-period search, a coherent tree search which permits optimal searching with O(1) cost per model, a semicoherent search which combines information from coherent subsearches while preserving as much phase information as possible, and a hierarchical search which interpolates between the coherent and semicoherent limits. Taken together, these algorithms improve the computational cost of pulsar search by several orders of magnitude. In this paper, we consider the simple case of a constant-acceleration phase model, but our methods should generalize to more complex search spaces.
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