Accelerating high-energy pulsar radiation codes

Curvature radiation (CR) is believed to be a dominant mechanism for creating gamma-ray emission from pulsars and is emitted by relativistic particles that are constrained to move along curved magnetic field lines. Additionally, synchrotron radiation (SR) is expected to be radiated by both relativistic primaries (involving cyclotron resonant absorption of radio photons and re-emission of SR photons), or secondary electron–positron pairs (created by magnetic or photon–photon pair production processes involving CR gamma rays in the pulsar magnetosphere). When calculating these high-energy spectra, especially in the context of pulsar population studies where several millions of CR and SR spectra have to be generated, it is profitable to consider approximations that would save computational time without sacrificing too much accuracy. This paper focuses on one such approximation technique, and we show that one may gain significantly in computational speed while preserving the accuracy of the spectral results