Radiation of the Vela pulsar

A new outergap model (with a horizontal gap) is studied. A possible stable horizontal gap is shown to exist for a static magnetosphere. Young pulsars (e.g. Crab and Vela) can have two such horizontal gaps. Each one will radiate two fan beams that cross each other, and cover almost 1800 in latitude. In particular, two crossing γ-ray beams with about the same energy and angle with vector B can produce electron-positron fans with large pitch angle. These, in turn, will produce large fluxes of IR photons radiated back through the gap and Compton boosted up by gap accelerated electrons and positrons to 10 TeV photons. These are materialized into pairs by the same flux of IR photons to make secondary pairs. These secondary pairs radiate a synchrotron spectrum in the 0.3 MeV to 3 GeV range. The surviving TeV photons are also detectable. The model is applied to the Vela pulsar. The calculated radiation spectrum (1 eV to 1012 eV), the double pulse structure, and their relative phase, match those observed. Radio emission from Vela based on a polar cap model with ion fluxes but no pair production is also considered