Numerical simulations of neutron star magnetospheres and magnetar bursts

Tickner, Daniel (2025) Numerical simulations of neutron star magnetospheres and magnetar bursts. Masters thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Magnetars are highly magnetised, slowly rotating varieties of neutron star. They are violent objects observed to emit bursts of radiation and, extremely rarely, giant flares powerful enough to outshine an entire galaxy. The origin of this transient behaviour is thought to be an ultra-strong internal magnetic field which diffuses outward toward the crust, driving starquakes there and displacing the footpoints of its external magnetic field lines. The field lines undergo magnetic reconnection, relaxing to lower-energy configurations and emitting huge bursts of radiation.

We build and present a numerical code to test this hypothesis by subjecting the magnetosphere of a fiducial neutron star to some initial twist and evolving its response over time. We find that our code is well suited to modelling the persistent twists that are expected to commonly occur in neutron star magnetospheres, but more physics is required before we can simulate reconnection and bursting events.

We develop from scratch a bank of numerical techniques including multidimensional numerical integration in curvilinear coordinate systems, high-accuracy first- and second-order finite differencing schemes, approximation of 1D mathematical functions by Chebyshev series on arbitrary domains - not just the standard x ∈ [−1, 1] - and approximations of 2D angular functions by vector spherical harmonic series. These techniques are quite general and may find application in any numerical simulation.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Engineering, Mathematics and Physics
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	29 Jan 2026 14:04
Last Modified:	29 Jan 2026 14:04
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/101793
DOI:

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