The Crab pulsar has a striking radio profile, dominated by two pulse components (the main pulse and interpulse) which are comprised of giant pulses. These pulses are randomly occurring, they extend to extremely high flux densities, and are closely aligned with emission across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The Crab, like many pulsars, exhibits scintillation – a pattern in frequency and time arising from interfering scattered images. The pattern varies with location, with the physical scale over which it changes by order unity corresponding to the spatial resolution of the scattering surface. For the Crab, the scattering is in the nebula and the estimated spatial resolution is of order the light cylinder radius. Comparing scintillation spectra of the two components, we infer a difference in physical location of the same order.

Atraditional problem in pulsar wind physics has been the nature of the pulsar wind.Ontheoretical grounds, the wind is expected to be dominated by Poynting flux associated with the outgoing magnetic field lines anchored on the polar caps of the rotating neutron star, while observations of the Crab Nebula demonstrate that the wind must be dominated by kinetic energy before the termination shock. Here we suggest a new approach to this old problem by studying the distributed currents rather than the singular sheet currents which have been the object of study in most work.We find that, at a distance well in between the light cylinder and the termination shock, current starvation sets in, and electric fields develop along the magnetic field lines which cause the current to dissipate and convert at least half of the Poynting flux into kinetic energy flux in a relatively thin shell. In the shell, at least half of the current closes across the magnetic field lines, the pitch of the spiralling magnetic field lines jumps downward strongly, and the outer pattern of magnetic field lines slips over the inner pattern.

ARCONS, the Array Camera for Optical to Near-infrared Spectrophotometry, was recently commissioned at the coudé focus of the 200-inch Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory. At the heart of this unique instrument is a 1024-pixel Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (MKID), exploiting the Kinetic Inductance effect to measure the energy of the incoming photon to better than several percent. The ground-breaking instrument is lens-coupled with a pixel scale of 0″.23/pixel, each pixel recording the arrival time (< 2 μ sec) and energy of a photon (~10%) in the optical to near-IR (0.4–1.1 microns) range. The scientific objectives of the instrument include the rapid follow-up and classification of transient phenomena.

Although optical pulsar studies have been limited to a few favoured objects, the observation of pulsars at optical wavelengths provides an opportunity to derive a number of important pulsar characteristics, including the energy spectrum of the emitting electrons and the geometry of the emission zone. These parameters will be vital for a comprehensive model of pulsar emission mechanisms. Observations of the Crab pulsar with the high-time-resolution photon-tagging photometer IquEYE show an optical–radio delay of ~178 μs. Incorporating simultaneous Jodrell Bank radio observations suggested a correlation between giant radio pulses and enhanced optical pulses for this pulsar, thus offering possible evidence for the reprocessing of radio photons.