| The first part of this thesis is a study of electron-positron pair production, accumulation, and annihilation within a Crab-like pulsar magnetosphere. The formation of an electron-positron layer well above the pulsar surface, in which gravitational pull toward the star is balanced by cyclotron scattering of polar cap X-rays, is shown to be a necessary consequence of outer-magnetosphere accelerator models for Crab-like pulsars. This layer seems capable of giving both the 10{dollar}sp{lcub}40{rcub}{dollar}s{dollar}sp{lcub}-1{rcub}{dollar} e{dollar}sp{lcub}pm{rcub}{dollar} pair annihilation rate and the narrow gravitationally red-shifted e{dollar}sppm{dollar} annihilation line shape in the pulsar spectrum reported by the Figaro collaboration. Possible applications to {dollar}gamma{dollar}-ray pulsars with smaller spin-down powers than that of the Crab pulsar are also considered.; The second part is a study of pulsar magnetic field evolution driven by the strong interaction between neutron superfluid vortices and proton superconductor flux tubes in the cores of neutron stars. The magnitudes and evolution of spin-down indices in canonical pulsars can be well understood within the model. If the growing strains caused by the changing of core magnetic field configuration in the crusts of canonical spinning-down pulsars are relaxed by sudden large scale crust-cracking events, special features are predicted for the resulting jumps in rotation period and these are compared to observations of glitches. They include glitch activity, permanent shifts in spin-down rates associated with glitches in young pulsars, the intervals between glitches, the magnitudes of glitches in the different glitch families, an explanation of why glitch intervals and magnitudes should drop sharply as spin-period approaches 0.7s, and the general absence of glitching in longer period pulsars. |
