30 August 2026 to 4 September 2026
Asia/Tokyo timezone

A common four-beam geometry reveals altitude-stratified GeV pulses in canonical young pulsars

Not scheduled
20m
Oral Gamma-rays

Speaker

Paul K. H. YEUNG (ICRR, UTokyo)

Description

Despite the diversity and energy dependence of $\gamma$-ray pulse morphologies in Crab, Vela and Dragonfly, the phaseograms of these three canonical young pulsars can be organised within a single four-beam geometric template. Using \textit{Fermi} Large Area Telescope data, we fit the 60~MeV--3~GeV phaseograms with a mechanism-agnostic, geometry-first parametric model that incorporates phase-dependent Doppler shifts and constrains the three-dimensional locations and bulk motions of four emission sites. In each pulsar, the phaseogram admits a decomposition into two altitude-separated beam pairs. For Crab, the phaseogram alone does not uniquely require altitude separation, but co-located solutions are disfavoured when confronted with independent constraints on the viewing geometry. The lower-altitude pair is produced by plasma with bulk motion close to azimuthal corotation, sharpening the main peaks. The higher-altitude pair shows a radially outward bulk-motion component, suggestive of inertial effects in a toroidally dominated magnetic field, and contributes bridge/shoulder emission and ripple-like modulations overlapping the main peaks. The lower-altitude pair is consistent with curvature-dominated outer-magnetospheric emission, while the higher-altitude pair is consistent with synchrotron-dominated emission from a current-sheet-like outflow. Higher-altitude site heights increase from $\simeq 0.7$ (Crab, $\approx 1$~kyr) to $\simeq 1.1$--$1.4$ light-cylinder radii (Vela and Dragonfly, $\approx 10$~kyr), consistent with vertical inflation of the outflow-transition layer. This unified four-beam, observation-driven geometry maps an altitude-dependent azimuthal tilt of pulsed $\gamma$-ray emission, providing an observationally anchored framework amenable to systematic tests and readily extensible to other young pulsars.

Primary authors

Paul K. H. YEUNG (ICRR, UTokyo) Prof. Takayuki Saito (ICRR, UTokyo)

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