ON THE POSSIBILITY OF CURVATURE RADIATION FROM RADIO PULSARS

We consider the widespread hypothesis that coherent curvature radiatio n is responsible for the radio emission of pulsars. The comparison of energy conservation and the published data and luminosities explicitly proves that coherent curvature radiation cannot be the source for the radio emission of pulsars for frequencies below a few GHz. At higher frequencies coherent curvature radiation can be ruled out because neit her the observationally deduced emission heights nor the observed radi us to frequency mapping can be reproduced by this mechanism. Our argum entation is in accordance with the more general critics (e.g. Melrose 1992) that no adequate bunching mechanism has been identified for cohe rent curvature radiation. We present 5 examples (0329+29, 0355+54, 054 0+23, 1133+16, 1916+10) of pulsars whose high frequency (larger than 1 .4. GHz, up to 32 GHz) luminosities are well known, and as a low frequ ency example the faintest radio pulsar 0655+64 of the Taylor et al (19 93) sample.