Jonathan Arons: Beam Filamentation Instability of Interacting Current Sheets in Striped Relativistic Winds: The Origin of Low Sigma?

According to models, pulsar wind nebula behave as if the wind is weakly magnetized at termination shock. For the aligned rotator, the current sheet is flat and along the equator. In reality, pulsars are oblique rotators. The current sheet of such a pulsar travels away with the wind outflow and has a more complicated "wavy" or "striped" topology. One has to find a way of dissipating the striped sheets as they travel away in order to obtain a low magnetization at the termination shock. You may imagine these striped sheets as parallel slabs having anti-parallel magnetic fields, which generate, in the highly magnetized plasma in between, a current flow. Plausible magnetization dissipation mechanisms are investigated within this framework.