9-13 July 2012
Africa/Johannesburg timezone
<a href="http://events.saip.org.za/internalPage.py?pageId=11&confId=14"><font color=#ff0000>SAIP2012 PROCEEDINGS AVAILABLE</font></a>

The Effect of Different Magnetospheric Structures on Predictions of Gamma-ray Pulsar Light Curves

11 Jul 2012, 09:00
20m
Oral Presentation Track D1 - Astrophysics Astrophysics

Speaker

Ms Monica Breed (North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus)

Main supervisor (name and email)<br>and his / her institution

Dr. Christo Venter
12006653@nwu.ac.za
North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus

Level for award<br>&nbsp;(Hons, MSc, <br> &nbsp; PhD)?

MSc

Apply to be<br> consider for a student <br> &nbsp; award (Yes / No)?

Yes

Would you like to <br> submit a short paper <br> for the Conference <br> Proceedings (Yes / No)?

Yes

Abstract content <br> &nbsp; (Max 300 words)

The second pulsar catalogue of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) will contain in excess of 100 gamma-ray pulsars. The light curves (LCs) of these pulsars exhibit a variety of shapes, and also different relative phase lags with respect to their radio pulses, hinting at distinct underlying magnetospheric geometries and emission properties for the individual pulsars. Detailed geometric modelling of the radio and gamma-ray LCs may provide constraints on the B-field structure and emission geometry. We used different B-field solutions in conjunction with an existing geometric modelling code, including the static vacuum dipole, the retarded vacuum dipole, and offset-dipole solutions, and constructed radiation sky maps and LCs for several different pulsar parameters. Standard emission geometries were assumed, namely the Two-Pole Caustic (TPC) and Outer Gap (OG) models. The sky maps and LCs of the various B-field and radiation model combinations were compared to study their effect on the resulting LCs. As an application, we compared our model LCs with Fermi LAT data for the Vela pulsar, and inferred the most probable configuration in this case, thereby constraining Vela’s high-altitude magnetic structure and system geometry.

Primary author

Ms Monica Breed (North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus)

Co-authors

Dr Alice Harding (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) Dr Christo Venter (North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus) Dr Tyrel Johnson (NRC Fellow, High-Energy Space Environment Branch, Naval Research Laboratory)

Presentation Materials

Peer reviewing

Paper