Pulsar Magnetosphere : A General Relativistic Treatment

Abstract

A fully general relativistic description of the pulsar magnetosphere is provided. To be more concrete, a study of the pulsar magnetosphere is performed in the context of general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) employing the so-called Grad-Shafranov approach. Not surprisingly, the resulting Grad-Shafranov equations and all the other related general relativistic MHD equations turn out to take essentially the same structures as those for the (rotating) black hole magnetosphere. Other different natures between the two cases including the structure of singular surfaces of MHD flows in each magnetosphere are essentially encoded in the different spacetime (metric) contents. In this way, the pulsar and the black hole magnetospheres can be described in an unified fashion. Particularly, the direction of poloidal currents circulating in the neutron star magnetosphere turns out to be the same as that of currents circulating in the black hole magnetosphere which, in turn, leads to the pulsar and the black hole spin-downs via the ``magnetic braking''.