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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2017
As noted previously in this meeting, any millisecond pulsar that is not perfectly aligned must obviously be strongly charged electrostatically simply because the wave zone is so close to the surface that any trapped neutralizing electrosphere over the polar caps will be driven away beyond 6 or 7 neutron-star radii. Acceleration of stray charges (e.g., from the ISM or a nearby orbiting disk) in such a highly charged system automatically produces coherently radiating bunches of downward moving particles (Michel 1990), this coherent radiation simply reflecting from the surface (or missing the star entirely, as an alternative possibility). This mechanism, suggestive of how pulsars might operate, we will call a pair-production avalanche.