What Pulsar High-Energy Emission Model Survives?

We explore particle accelerator electrodynamics in the magnetosphere of a rapidly rotating neutron star (NS). We address the importance of a self-consistent treatment of pair production, solving the Maxwell and Boltzmann equations simultaneously. It is demonstrated that the accelerator solution is obtained if we specify only the following four parameters: the NS spin period, magnetic dipole moment, magnetic inclination angle with respect to the rotation axis, and the NS surface temperature. Applying the scheme to the Crab pulsar, we show that the solution reproduces the gamma-ray observations at least qualitatively and that the solution corresponds to a quantitative extension of phenomenological outer-gap models. We also apply it to the slot-gap model, a geometrically thin version of the pair-starved polarcap (PSPC) model, to show that this alternativemodel predicts too small photon flux compared to observations. It is discussed that the PSPC model is electrodynamically vulnerable to pair production.