Gralla, Samuel E. and Iqbal, Nabil (2019) 'Effective field theory of force-free electrodynamics.', Physical review D., 99 (10). p. 105004.
Abstract
Force-free electrodynamics (FFE) is a closed set of equations for the electromagnetic field of a magnetically dominated plasma. There are strong arguments for the existence of force-free plasmas near pulsars and active black holes, but FFE alone cannot account for the observational signatures, such as coherent radio emission and relativistic jets and winds. We reformulate FFE as the effective field theory of a cold string fluid and initiate a systematic study of corrections in a derivative expansion. At leading order the effective theory is equivalent to (generalized) FFE, with the strings comprised by magnetic field line world sheets. Higher-order corrections generically give rise to nonzero accelerating electric fields (E⋅B≠0). We discuss potential observable consequences and comment on an intriguing numerical coincidence.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Full text: | (VoR) Version of Record Available under License - Creative Commons Attribution. Download PDF (289Kb) |
| Status: | Peer-reviewed |
| Publisher Web site: | https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.105004 |
| Publisher statement: | Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3. |
| Date accepted: | 27 March 2019 |
| Date deposited: | 17 May 2019 |
| Date of first online publication: | 14 May 2019 |
| Date first made open access: | 17 May 2019 |
Save or Share this output
| Export: | |
| Look up in GoogleScholar |
