2006/08/02 by Kouichi Hirotani · 7 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Acceleration #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Classical mechanics #Computational physics #Earthquake Detection and Analysis #Electric field #Electron #Luminosity #Magnetic field #Magnetosphere #Neutron star #Nuclear physics #Particle acceleration #Physics #Pulsar #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum mechanics #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/508317
published as Astrophys.J.652:1475-1493,2006 · 36 pages, 14 figures, accepted to Astroph. J
arxiv created 2006/08/02 · openalex publication_date 2006/11/27 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We investigate the self-consistent electrodynamic structure of a particle accelerator in the Crab pulsar magnetosphere on the two-dimensional poloidal plane, solving the Poisson equation for the electrostatic potential together with the Boltzmann equations for electrons, positrons, and γ-rays. If the transfield thickness of the gap is thin, the created current density becomes sub-Goldreich-Julian, giving the traditional outer-gap solution but with negligible γ-ray luminosity. As the thickness increases, the created current increases to become super-Goldreich-Julian, giving a new gap solution with substantially screened acceleration electric field in the inner part. In this case, the gap extends toward the neutron star with a small-amplitude positive acceleration field, extracting ions from the stellar surface as a space-charge-limited flow. The acceleration field is highly unscreened in the outer magnetosphere, resulting in a γ-ray spectral shape that is consistent with the observations.