The Crab pulsar at VHE

Abstract

The last six years have witnessed major revisions of our knowledge about the Crab Pulsar. The consensus scenario for the origin of the high-energy pulsed emission has been challenged with the discovery of a very-high-energy power law tail extending up to ~400 GeV, above the expected spectral cut off at a few GeV. Now, new measurements obtained by the MAGIC collaboration extend the energy spectrum of the Crab Pulsar even further, on the TeV regime. Above ~400 GeV the pulsed emission comes mainly from the interpulse, which becomes more prominent with energy due to a harder spectral index. These findings require γ -ray production via inverse Compton scattering close to or beyond the light cylinder radius by an underlying particle population with Lorentz factors greater than 5 × 106. We will present those new results and discuss the implications in our current knowledge concerning pulsar environments.