Modelling energy-dependent pulsar light curves due to curvature radiation

Monica Barnard, Christo Venter, Alice K. Harding, Constantinos Kalapotharakos

Published 2018-11-28Version 1

Pulsars emit pulsed emission across the entire electromagnetic spectrum and their light curve phenomenology is strongly dependent on energy. This is also true for the gamma-ray waveband. Continued detections by Fermi Large Area Telescope in the GeV band and ground-based Cherenkov telescopes in the TeV band (e.g., Crab and Vela above 1 TeV) raise important questions about our understanding of the electrodynamics and local environment of pulsar magnetospheres. We model energy-dependent light curves (as a function of geometry, e.g., pulsar inclination and observer angle) in the curvature radiation domain using a full emission code. We will discuss our refined calculation of the curvature radius of the particle trajectory and the effect thereof on the expected light curve shapes, as well as the origin of the light curve peaks in the magnetosphere. Our modelling should aid in differentiating between different emission mechanisms, as well as constraining the emission geometry by comparing our predictions to multi-wavelength data.