The Pulsar Gamma-Ray Emission from High-resolution Dissipative Magnetospheres

Abstract

The pulsar light curves and energy spectra in dissipative pulsar magnetospheres are explored with Aristotelian electrodynamics (AE), where particle acceleration is fully balanced with the radiation reaction. AE magnetospheres with nonzero pair multiplicity are computed using a pseudo-spectral method in the co-moving frame. The dissipative region near the current sheet outside the light cylinder is accurately captured by a high-resolution simulation. The pulsar light curves and spectra are computed using the test particle trajectory method, including the influence of both the consistent accelerating electric field and radiation reaction. Our results can generally reproduce the double-peak light curves and the GeV cutoff energy spectra in agreement with the Fermi observations for the pair multiplicity κ ≳ 1.