The alignment of the Crab pulsar magnetic axis

The magnetic distortion is estimated for neutron stars in which the matter in the interior consists of superfluid neutrons and superconducting protons. For type II proton superconductivity, the arrangement of magnetic flux in a two-dimensional lattice of quantized fluxoids and the kinetic energy of the supercurrent carriers cause some components of the spatially averaged stress tensor for field and superconductor to be several orders of magnitude greater than the components of the Max-well stress tensor for a uniform distribution of the same magnetic flux. It is shown that for the Crab pulsar PSR 0531+21, which is considered to have the greater part of its mass in the form of superfluid neutrons and superconducting protons, the magnetic distortion is almost certainly more important than the clastic energy of the outer shell in determining the departure of the inertia tensor from its spherically symmetric form. With the assumption that internal and external magnetic fields have the same symmetry axis, the external field dipole moment of the Crab pulsar is predicted to be approximately perpendicular to the spin direction, in agreement with a number of published interpretations of observational data.