|
|
|
CSPA/Physics Astro Colloquia
3:10pm, Tuesday 20 January 2009; Physics meeting room
Matthew Verdon
"Wave propagation and polarization in an oscillating pulsar magnetosphere"
|
The existence of orthogonally polarized modes (OPMs) in pulsar radio emission is difficult to explain. Currently favoured theory suggests that radiation is generated via a plasma instability, and hence should be produced predominantly in a single mode. However, to explain OPMs the radiation must escape in a mixture of two orthogonally polarized modes; moreover a roughly equal mixture seems to be required in some cases, and the modes are often significantly elliptically polarized. How an equal mixture of two modes can be produced routinely is not understood. In this talk I discuss the problem of OPMs, and describe ongoing work on the polarization properties of the modes in a plasma predicted by an oscillating model for the pulsar magnetosphere. The effect of the changing cyclotron resonance on the polarization of the modes is discussed, and mode coupling effects that may provide some explanation for OPMs are described.
|
|
Please email all enquiries to daniel.price@sci.monash.edu.au or rosemary.mardling@sci.monash.edu.au
|
