The effect of an offset-dipole magnetic field on the Vela pulsar's gamma-ray light curves

TL;DR

This study explores how an offset-dipole magnetic field influences gamma-ray light curves of the Vela pulsar, revealing that the retarded vacuum dipole combined with the outer gap model best fits observed data.

Contribution

The paper introduces an offset-dipole magnetic field into pulsar models and compares various configurations to Fermi Vela data, identifying the most accurate magnetic and emission geometry.

Findings

Retarded vacuum dipole with outer gap model provides best fit.

Offset-dipole fields affect gamma-ray light curve shapes.

Model comparisons improve understanding of pulsar magnetospheres.

Abstract

Over the past six years, the Fermi Large Area Telescope has detected more than 150 gamma-ray pulsars, discovering a variety of light curve trends and classes. Such diversity hints at distinct underlying magnetospheric and/or emission geometries. We implemented an offset-dipole magnetic field, with an offset characterised by parameters epsilon and magnetic azimuthal angle, in an existing geometric pulsar modelling code which already includes static and retarded vacuum dipole fields. We use these different magnetic field solutions in conjunction with standard emission geometries, namely the two-pole caustic and outer gap models (the latter only for non-offset dipoles), and construct intensity maps and light curves for several pulsar parameters. We compare our model light curves to the Vela data from the second pulsar catalogue of Fermi. We use a refined chi-square grid search method for finding best-fit light curves for each of the different models. Our best fit is for the retarded vacuum dipole field and the outer gap model.