Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of massive stars that have undergone a supernovae explosion. They have an average diameter of 20 kilometers and weigh about 1.4 solar masses. Those of them have very high spin rates, that range from a few RPS to thousands of RPS, And are highly magnetized, releasing photons in two beam-like structures. If those beams pass through earth at least once per rotation, we call the neutron star a pulsar.
The exact emission model of the beams in poorly understood, but it is generally accepted that the beam of the pulsar is cone-shape, centered at the magnetic axis and emitted at a certain height above the surface. Plasma flows in the open magnetic field lines and releases photons tangentially to the open lines, forming the beam. Consequently, the angle between the side of the beam and the magnetic axis, known as the opening angle, is dependent on the width of the open field lines at the height of emission.
The currently accepted model that relates the width and the opening angle places great constraint on the allowed values and poorly describes available published data. We have modified the model to give a less constrained relationship, which outperforms the approach used in literature as standard. Following our initial results, we are working on expanding to a larger dataset that is representative of the known pulsar population. We extract the geometry of the beam using the Rotating vector model, which relates the angle between the magnetic and rotational axis, as well as the angle between the observers line of sight and the magnetic axis to the polarization position angle of the pulsar beam.