Gravity seminar - Jerome Petri Seminar

 

Although discovered almost 50 years ago, neutron stars and especially pulsars remain enigmatic compact objects but exquisite places where to test our current theories in strong magnetic and gravitational fields. Pulsars have been detected in the whole electromagnetic spectrum, from radio up to gamma-rays. So far no consensus emerged about a single reliable explanation of this broad band emission feature. In this talk I will summarize our current knowledges about pulsar magnetospheric plasma physics from an observational and theoretical point of view. I will review several hypotheses about their radiation mechanisms and related location in the magnetosphere or wind and the observational constraints. Future phase-resolved spectroscopy and polarization detections could strongly discriminate between competing high-energy models and would be valuable indicators for the magnetic field topology at the emission sites.