Can the inner gap sparking take place in millisecond pulsars?
The inner vacuum gap model has become the foundation stone of most theories on pulsar radio emission. The fundamental picture of this model is the sparking, which was conjectured to be induced by magnetic absorption of background gamma photons. However, a question is, can the sparking be triggered in the millisecond pulsars (MSPs) with magnetic fields (B) only about 10s G? We investigate this problem by including the pair production above the inner gap. Under the assumption that the magnetic field is dipolar, our results show the background gamma-ray emission can not be the key factor that triggers the sparking, at least not in MSPs with B ～ 108 G, if the temperature in the polar cap region is only so high as is observed (＜ 4 × 106 K). Some other mechanisms are required.
作 者： Hong-Guang Wang Guo-Jun Qiao Ren-Xin Xu 作者单位： Department of Astronomy, Peking University, Beijing 100871 刊 名： 天体物理学报(英文版) ISTIC SCI 英文刊名： CHINESE JOURNAL OF ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS 年，卷(期)： 2003 3(5) 分类号： P14 关键词： pulsar: general-gamma rays-magnetic fields