Gamma-ray spectra of the Crab, Vela and Geminga pulsars fitted with SED of the emission from their current sheet

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the gamma-ray spectra of the Crab, Vela, and Geminga pulsars can be accurately modeled using the emission from their current sheets, providing a unified fit across a wide energy range and linking parameters to neutron star properties.

Contribution

It introduces a novel spectral energy distribution model based on superluminal current sheet emission that fits pulsar gamma-ray spectra across the entire observed energy range.

Findings

The model fits gamma-ray spectra from 100 MeV to 20 TeV for all three pulsars.

The fit parameters are connected to physical characteristics of the neutron stars and their magnetospheres.

The proposed SED differs from existing emission mechanism models used in the literature.

Abstract

We show that the spectral energy distribution (SED) of the tightly focused radiation generated by the superluminally moving current sheet in the magnetosphere of a non-aligned neutron star fits the gamma-ray spectra of the Crab, Vela and Geminga pulsars over the entire range of photon energies so far detected by Fermi-LAT, MAGIC and HESS from them: over $10^2$ MeV to $20$ TeV. While emblematic of any emission that entails caustics, the SED introduced here radically differs from those of the disparate emission mechanisms currently invoked in the literature to fit the data in different sections of these spectra. We specify, moreover, the connection between the values of the fit parameters for the analysed spectra and the physical characteristics of the central neutron stars of the Crab, Vela and Geminga pulsars and their magnetospheres.