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18-02-2021
Colloquium: Origin of pulsar radio emission
| Submitter: | Pikky Atri |
| Description: | Andrey Timokhin University of Zielona Gora, Poland For more than five decades, astrophysicists have wondered how radio pulsars -- rapidly rotating highly magnetized neutron stars -- produce coherent radio emission. In this talk I describe results of our recent first-principles simulations of electron-positron pairs creation near magnetic poles of neutron stars -- the process responsible for filling pulsar magnetosphere with dense pair plasma -- which provide a clue to this long-standing mystery. For the first time we directly demonstrate that the naturally-arising intermittency of the pair creation process and its non-uniformity across magnetic field lines lead to the emission of strong coherent electromagnetic waves with properties commensurate with that of the observed pulsar radio emission. These findings will lay the theoretical foundation for the interpretation of a plethora of observational phenomena seen in radio pulsars and other isolated neutron stars. |
| Copyright: | Image submitted by speaker as part of their work. |
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