Centrifugal acceleration of plasma in pulsar magnetosphere

Abstract

We present a relativistic model for the centrifugal acceleration of plasma bunches and the coherent radio emission in pulsar magnetosphere. We find that rotation broadens the width of leading component compared to the width of trailing component. We explain this difference in the component widths using the nested cone emission geometry. We estimate the effect of pulsar spin on the Stokes parameters, and find that the inclination between the rotation and magnetic axes can introduce an asymmetry in the circular polarization of the conal components. We analyse the single pulse polarization data of PSR B032954 at 606 MHz, and find that in its conal components, one sense of circular polarization dominates in the leading component while the other sense dominates in the trailing component. Our simulation shows that changing the sign of the impact parameter changes the sense of circular polarization as well as the swing of polarization angle