Reconnection in a striped pulsar wind

It is generally thought that most of the spin-down power of a pulsar is car ried away in an MHD wind dominated by Poynting flux. In the case of an obli que rotator, a significant part of this energy can be considered to be in a low-frequency wave, consisting of stripes of a toroidal magnetic field of alternating polarity propagating in a region around the equatorial plane. M agnetic reconnection in such a structure has been proposed as a mechanism f or transforming the Poynting flux into particle energy in the pulsar wind. We have reexamined this process and conclude that the wind accelerates sign ificantly in the course of reconnection. This dilates the timescale over wh ich the reconnection process operates so that the wind requires a much larg er distance than was previously thought in order to convert the Poynting fl ux to particle flux. In the case of the Crab pulsar, the wind is still Poyn ting-dominated at the radius at which a standing shock is inferred from obs ervation. An estimate of the radius of the termination shock for other puls ars implies that all except the millisecond pulsars have Poynting flux-domi nated winds all the way out to the shock front.