Magnetic Field Decay in Single Radio Pulsars: A Statistical Study

Abstract

We report on an extensive statistical study of single radio pulsar properties, which weundertook to estimate the decay timescale of pulsar magnetic fields.We synthesized a population of pulsars using assumed theoreticaldistributions of age, initial magnetic field, period of rotation,position, luminosity, and dispersion measure, taking into account the newdistance model for pulsars as well as new velocity estimates. We alsotook into account the selection effects that characterize pulsarobservations. We compared the simulated population with the observed singlepulsar population using one- and two-dimensional Kolmogorov-Smirnovtests to obtain a lower bound of ~160 Myr on the decay timescale.