Spacetime approach to force-free magnetospheres

par Prof. Ted JACOBSON (University of Maryland)

jeudi 21 nov. 2013, 16:45 → 17:45 Europe/Paris

Amphithéâtre Léon Motchane (Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques)

Neutron star and black hole magnetospheres, converting rotational energy to Poynting flux, are often modeled using force-free electrodynamics, since the energy of the field dominates that of the charged matter. In this peculiar scheme, the requirement that the 4-force on the current vanish plays the role of a non-linear field equation, with the current defined by the field via Maxwell's equations. This talk will show how the theory becomes remarkably simple and elegant when treated relativistically with the help of differential forms, and some applications and new exact solutions will be discussed.