Where are the young pulsars?

Abstract

We show that young pulsars with normal magnetic fields, which are born as fast rotating neutron stars (NSs) in Type II/Ib supernova explosions, can slow down quickly by relativistic particles emission along their magnetic axis. When they slow down sufficiently, they can undergo phase transitions and collapse to strange stars, quark stars or black holes in explosions that remove a substantial fraction of their initial angular momentum. The newly born strange or quark stars continue to cool and spin down very quickly as soft gamma ray repeaters (SGRs) and anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs) to become slowly rotating, radio-quiet, dim X-ray pulsars or stellar black holes, depending on their initial mass. It can explain the apparent dearth of young radio pulsars in SNRs and in the Galaxy.