General Relativistic Electromagnetic Fields of a Slowly Rotating Magnetized Neutron Star. II. Solution of the Induction Equations

Abstract

We have solved numerically the general relativistic induction equations in the interior background spacetime of a slowly rotating magnetized neutron star. The analytic form of these equations was discussed in a recent paper (Rezzolla et al 2001a), where corrections due both to the spacetime curvature and to the dragging of reference frames were shown to be present. Through a number of calculations we have investigated the evolution of the magnetic field with different rates of stellar rotation, different inclination angles between the magnetic moment and the rotation axis, as well as different values of the electrical conductivity. All of these calculations have been performed for a constant temperature relativistic polytropic star and make use of a consistent solution of the initial value problem which avoids the use of artificial analytic functions. Our results show that there exist general relativistic effects introduced by the rotation of the spacetime which tend to decrease the decay rate of the magnetic field. The rotation-induced corrections are however generally hidden by the high electrical conductivity of the neutron star matter and when realistic values for the electrical conductivity are considered, these corrections become negligible even for the fastest known pulsar.