Speaker: Zorawar Wadiasingh, University of Maryland at College Park
Abstract: Pulsars are one of nature's most extreme particle accelerators, as reinforced by the recent HESS-II detection of pulsed multi-TeV emission from the Vela pulsar. Fermi-LAT pulsars provide a population-level laboratory for magnetospheric accelerators and, potentially, pulsed neutrino production from the outer magnetosphere and equatorial current sheet (ECS). Building on ECS models constrained by catalog data and global particle-in-cell simulations, we interpret the gamma-ray “Fundamental Plane” as curvature radiation from particles accelerated near and beyond the light cylinder. At the highest spin-down powers, both young pulsars and MSPs depart from the maximal (radiation-reaction-limited) envelope at similar spectral cutoffs, consistent with γγ-induced pair-cascade feedback that screens the accelerating field in the ECS. Based on these arguments and the same compactness picture, we outline a γγ→µ± channel in or near the ECS that could yield phase-aligned (with the GeV/TeV photons) multi-TeV neutrinos, enabling pulse phase-gated searches that might suppress atmospheric and diffuse backgrounds. Representative young pulsars can yield neutrinos up to ~10 to 20 TeV, while optimistic Crab-like regimes can approach neutrino luminosities ~10^34 erg/s. Likewise, a population of MSPs might contribute in aggregate to the quasi-diffuse Galactic neutrino signal. These scalings motivate targeted searches and stacking strategies for pulsars below ~100 TeV in neutrinos.