Coherent Emission in Pulsars, Magnetars, and Fast Radio Bursts: Reconnection-driven Free Electron Laser

We develop a model of the generation of coherent radio emission in the Crab pulsar, magnetars, and fast radio bursts (FRBs). Emission is produced by a reconnection-generated beam of particles via a variant of the free electron laser mechanism, operating in a weakly turbulent, guide field-dominated plasma. We first consider nonlinear Thomson scattering in a guide field-dominated regime, and apply it to explain emission bands observed in Crab pulsar and in FRBs. We consider particle motion in a combined field of the electromagnetic wave and the electromagnetic (Alfvénic) wiggler. Charge bunches, created via a ponderomotive force, Compton/Raman scatter the wiggler field coherently. The model is both robust to the underlying plasma parameters and succeeds in reproducing a number of subtle observed features: (i) emission frequencies depend mostly on the scale λ t of turbulent fluctuations and the Lorentz factor of the reconnection-generated beam, ω ∼ γ b 2 ( c / λ t ) —it is independent of the absolute value of the underlying magnetic field. (ii) The model explains both broadband emission and the presence of emission stripes, including multiple stripes observed in the high frequency interpulse of the Crab pulsar. (iii) The model reproduces correlated polarization properties: the presence of narrow emission bands in the spectrum favors linear polarization, while broadband emission can have an arbitrary polarization. (iv) The mechanism is robust to the momentum spread of the particle in the beam. We also discuss a model of wigglers as nonlinear force-free Alfvén solitons (light darts).