Radio pulsars: the search for truth

TL;DR

This paper revisits a 1980s theory explaining radio pulsar magnetospheres and coherent radio emission, demonstrating its consistency and predictive power with recent observational data.

Contribution

It provides a thorough validation of the long-debated pulsar magnetosphere theory using new observational and wave propagation data.

Findings

The theory has no internal inconsistencies.

Recent data support the theory's basic conclusions.

The theory allows quantitative predictions of neutron star evolution.

Abstract

It was as early as the 1980s that A V Gurevich and his group proposed a theory to explain the magnetosphere of radio pulsars and the mechanism by which they produce coherent radio emission. The theory has been sharply criticized and is currently rarely mentioned when discussing the observational properties of radio pulsars, even though all the criticisms were in their time disproven in a most thorough and detailed manner. Recent results show even more conclusively that the theory has no internal inconsistencies. New observational data also demonstrate the validity of the basic conclusions of the theory. Based on the latest results on the effects of wave propagation in the magnetosphere of a neuron star, we show that the developed theory does indeed allow quantitative predictions of the evolution of neutron stars and the properties of the observed radio emission.