A wind model for high energy pulses

Abstract. A solution to the problem | that of nding a mechanism capable of converting Poynting energy ux to particle-borne energy ux in a pulsar wind | was pro-posed several years ago by Coroniti and Michel who con-sidered a particular prescription for magnetic reconnection in a striped wind. This prescription was later shown to be ineective. In this paper, we discuss the basic microphysics of the reconnection process and conclude that a more rapid prescription is permissible. Assuming dissipation to set in at some distance outside the light-cylinder, we compute the resulting radiation signature and nd that the syn-chrotron emission of heated particles appears periodic, in general showing both a pulse and an interpulse. The pre-dicted spacing of these agrees well with observation in the case of the Crab and Vela pulsars. Using parameters ap-propriate for the Crab pulsar | magnetisation parameter at the light cylinder L = 6 10 4, Lorentz factor = 250 | reasonable agreement is found with the observed to-tal pulsed luminosity. This suggest that the high-energy pulses from young pulsars originate not in the corotating magnetosphere within the light cylinder (as in all other models) but from the radially directed wind well outside it