1 research outputs found
The spark-associated soliton model for pulsar radio emission
We propose a new, self-consistent theory of coherent pulsar radio emission
based on the non-stationary sparking model of Ruderman & Sutherland (1975),
modified by Gil & Sendyk (2000) in the accompanying Paper I. According to these
authors, the polar cap is populated as densely as possible by a number of
sparks with a characteristic perpendicular dimension D approximately equal to
the polar gap height scale h, separated from each other also by about h. Each
spark reappears in approximately the same place on the polar cap for a time
scale much longer than its life-time and delivers to the open magnetosphere a
sequence of electron-positron clouds which flow orderly along a flux tube of
dipolar magnetic field lines. The overlapping of particles with different
momenta from consecutive clouds leads to effective two-stream instability,
which triggers electrostatic Langmuir waves at the altitudes of about 50
stellar radii. The electrostatic oscillations are modulationally unstable and
their nonlinear evolution results in formation of ``bunch-like'' charged
solitons. A characteristic soliton length along magnetic field lines is about
30 cm, so they are capable of emitting coherent curvature radiation at radio
wavelengths. The net soliton charge is about 10^21 fundamental charges,
contained within a volume of about 10^14 cm^3. For a typical pulsar, there are
about 10^5 solitons associated with each of about 25 sparks operating on the
polar cap at any instant. One soliton moving relativisticaly along dipolar
field lines with a Lorentz factor of the order of 100 generates a power of
about 10^21 erg/s by means of curvature radiation. Then the total power of a
typical radio pulsar can be estimated as being about 10^(27-28) erg/s.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures, accepted by Ap