Obliquely rotating pulsars: screening of the inductive electric field

Understand

Pulsar electrodynamics has been built up by taking ingredients from two models, the vacuum-dipole model, which ignores the magnetosphere but includes the inductive electric field due to the obliquely rotating magnetic dipole, and the corotating-magnetosphere model, which neglects the vacuum inductive electric field and assumes a corotating magnetosphere.

• We argue that the inductive field can be neglected only if it is screened by a current, ${\bi J}_{\rm sc}$, which we calculate for a rigidly rotating magnetosphere.
• Screening of the parallel component of the inductive field can be effective, but the perpendicular component cannot be screened in a pulsar magnetosphere.
• The incompletely screened inductive electric field has not been included in any model for a pulsar magnetosphere, and taking it into account has important implications.