Particle Populations And High Energy Emission In Pulsar Wind Nebulae

Download or read book Particle Populations and High Energy Emission in Pulsar Wind Nebulae written by Albert Adam Van Etten and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Energetic particles streaming out from rapidly spinning neutron stars radiate across the electromagnetic spectrum, creating a pulsar wind nebula (PWN). Many PWNe are spatially resolved in the radio, X-ray, and even gamma-ray wavebands, and thereby provide an excellent laboratory to study not only pulsar winds and dynamics, but also shock processes, magnetic field evolution, and particle transport. Single-zone spectral energy distribution (SED) models have long been used to study the global properties of PWNe, but to fully take advantage of high spatial resolution data one must move beyond these simple models. Supported by multiple X-ray PWN observations, we describe multi-zone time-dependent SED model fitting, with particular emphasis on the spatial variations within nebulae. The SED model constrains the wind velocity profile, magnetic field profile, age and spin-down history of the central pulsar, and the PWN injection spectrum. These constraints are of great value to the study of the gamma-ray pulsar population, and to investigations of particle acceleration and the cosmic ray spectrum. The large size of many PWNe in the very high energy gamma-ray (TeV) regime is indicative of significant particle transport over the pulsar lifetime, and in the case study of HESS J1825-137 we find that rapid diffusion of high energy particles is required to match the multi-wavelength data.