THE AGES, SPEEDS AND OFFSPRING OF PULSARS

Abstract

ABSTRACT The first part of this thesis is devoted to the study of the cooling of low mass helium white dwarfs such as are found in binaries with millisecond pulsars. We describe in detail the construction of a numerical model to calculate accurate cooling ages for these stars, using the most recent input physics available and including our own calculations of low temperature opacities. We use the cooling ages we infer to determine the ages of individual millisecond pulsars in such binaries, which in turn allows us to place constraints on the initial spin periods and accretion histories of the neutron stars. We also provide low mass white dwarf mass-radius relations for those cases where a spectroscopic gravity can be measured. For PSR J1012+5307, this information, combined with radial velocity measurements, constrains the neutron star mass to be > 2 solar mass. Chapters 2 through 4 deal with these calculations. In chapter 5 we study the spallation of atmospheric helium by the pulsar wind and it's effect on the white dwarf cooling. The final chapter (chapter 7) deals with the velocity distribution of young pulsars.