II. Reconnection model of Crab flares.

The dates of receipt and acceptance should be in-serted later I. There is growing evidence that pulsars ’ high en-ergy emission is generated via Inverse Compton mechanism. II. The particles producing Crab flares, and possi-bly most of the Crab Nebula’s high energy emission, are accelerated via reconnection events, and not at shock via Fermi mechanisms. c © 0000 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim 1 PULSAR γ-RAY EMISSION Conventionally, γ-ray from pulsars were attributed to inco-herent curvature radiation. The detection of the Crab pulsar by VERITAS (VERITAS Collaboration & Aliu, 2011), Fig. 1, and the implied importance of inverse Compton (IC) scat-tering for the production of γ-ray photons (Lyutikov et al., 2012) signifies a paradigm shift in the study of pulsar high-energy emission. Most models of the underlying physical processes have to be re-evaluated (the geometrical models remain valid.) The importance of the IC scattering makes distinct predictions as to the observed properties of pulsar high-energy emission. One can derive a very general upper limit, independent of the particular details of the acceleration mechanism, on the possible energy of curvature photons (following a sim-ilar approach applicable to synchrotron emission de Jager et al., 1996; Lyutikov, 2010). Assuming that the radius of curvature Rc of the magnetic field lines is a fraction ξ of the light cylinder radius Rc = ξRLC and balancing accel-eration by electric field of the fraction of the magnetic field, E = ηB and radiative losses one can find the maximum energy of curvature emission within the Crab pulsar mag-netosphere br = 150 GeV η3/4 ξ. The possibility that the emission above the break energy is produced as a tail to the curvature emission is excluded by the fact that the spectrum of Crab pulsar reported by VERITAS does not show the ex-ponential cut-off indicative of the radiation reaction-limited curvature emission. Reanalyzing the Fermi spectra of the Geminga pulsar above the break, Lyutikov (2012) found that it is well ap