2014/11/07 by M. Breed, C. Venter, Breed, M. +5
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Inertial Sensor and Navigation #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1411.1835
openalex publication_date 2014/11/07 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The light curves of gamma-ray pulsars detected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope show great variety in profile shape and position relative to their radio profiles. Such diversity hints at distinct underlying magnetospheric and/or emission geometries for the individual pulsars. We implemented an offset-dipole magnetic field in an existing geometric pulsar modelling code which already includes static and retarded vacuum dipole fields. In our model, this offset is characterised by a parameter epsilon (with epsilon = 0 corresponding to the static dipole case). We constructed sky maps and light curves for several pulsar parameters and magnetic fields, studying the effect of an offset dipole on the resulting light curves. A standard two-pole caustic emission geometry was used. As an application, we compared our model light curves with Fermi data for the bright Vela pulsar.