Relativistic charge-separated winds

Abstract

An investigation is made into the effects of including charge separation in three-dimensional MHD wind models. Attention is focused on the energy gain experienced by particles in the wind zone of a magnetized rotator, e.g., a pulsar. An expression is defined for the energy gained by a particle emitted from the polar cap of a rotating neutron star while crossing the polar axis from the wind zone to the equatorial plane. The stellar wind is treated in terms of global electrodynamics and solutions are obtained for a neutral sheet wind, a monopole wind, and a simple wind model. The particle acceleration Lorentz factors are found to be a quadratic of those formerly predicted by MHD theory and in agreement with observations of energies around the Crab pulsar.