Electron-positron pair production by gamma rays in an anisotropic flux of soft photons, and application to pulsar polar caps

Understand

Electron-positron pair production by collision of photons is investigated in view of application to pulsar physics.

• We compute the absorption rate of individual gamma-ray photons by an arbitrary anisotropic distribution of softer photons, and the energy and angular spectrum of the outgoing leptons.
• We work analytically within the approximation that 1 mc 2 /E > /E, with E and the gamma-ray and soft-photon maximum energy and mc 2 the electron mass energy.
• We give results at leading order in these small parameters.