General-relativistic electromagnetic fields around a slowly rotating neutron star: Stationary vacuum solutions

Abstract

Pulsars are thought to be highly magnetized rotating neutron stars accelerating charged particles along magnetic field lines in their magnetosphere and visible as pulsed emission from the radio wavelength up to high-energy X-rays and gamma-rays. Being highly compact objects with compactness close to Ξ = Rs/R ≈ 0.5, where Rs = 2GM/c2 is the Schwarzschild radius and {M, R} the mass and radius of the neutron star, general-relativistic effects become important close to their surface. This is especially true for the polar caps where radio emission is supposed to emanate from, leading to well-defined signatures such as linear and circular polarization. In this paper, we derive a general formalism to extend to general relativity the Deutsch field solution valid in vacuum space. Thanks to a vector spherical harmonic expansion of the electromagnetic field, we are able to express the solution to any order in the spin parameter ω of the compact object. We hope this analysis to serve as a benchmark to test numerical codes used to compute black hole and neutron star magnetospheres. © 2013 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.