Electrodynamics of Massless Charges with Application to Pulsars

Abstract

Electromagnetic field together with zero-mass charges moving in this field form a well-behaved semi-dissipative dynamical system -- Electrodynamics of Massless Charges (EMC). We give equations of EMC, argue that EMC is an adequate theory for calculating pulsar magnetospheres, give an illustrative numerical calculation (showing that bolometric luminosity of an aligned rotator is approximately equal to half the spin-down power). EMC looks like a portion of the full pulsar theory that will resolve the already calculated bolometric luminosity into light curves and spectra.