Neutrinos from Pulsar Environments

Recent calculations of the neutrino fluxes and spectra emitted by pulsar magnetospheres and pulsar wind nebulae are reviewed. The neutrinos are tracers of energetic protons which are accelerated by an electrostatic potential in the near field of the pulsar by the Fermi mechanism in the termination shock of the pulsar wind or by reconnection-driven heating in the neutral sheet of the wind. The flux and spectrum are directly related to the energy of the incident proton beam and the density of the target protons and photons thereby constraining ion-loaded pulsar-wind models like the Arons-Gallant-Spitkovsky theory of the time-varying wisps and torus of the Crab nebula. Proton diffusion due to resonant wave-particle scattering in the wind is discussed. Related sources are also reviewed such as early-phase post-supernova pulsar winds and pulsar-driven gamma-ray-burst afterglows incorporating inverse Compton and ejecta fragmentation processes. The detectability of the neutrino signal by next generation detectors (IceCube) is assessed as is the correlation with GeV/TeV gamma rays (GLAST AGILE). Pulsar wind nebulae also open up the possibility of long-baseline oscillation experiments to search for fine splitting of the neutrino mass eigenstates or nonradiative neutrino decay.