Bursts of millisecond duration were recently discovered in the 1 GHz band. There is a strong evidence that they come from ∼1 Gpc distances, which implies extraordinary high-brightness temperature. I propose that these bursts could be attributed to synchrotron maser emission from relativistic, magnetized shocks. At the onset of the magnetar flare, a strongly magnetized pulse is formed, which propagates away through the relativistic magnetar wind and eventually reaches the nebula inflated by the wind within the surrounding medium. I show that the observed radio bursts could be generated at shocks formed via the interaction of the magnetic pulse with the plasma within the nebula. The model predicts strong millisecond bursts in the TeV band, which could be observed even from distant galaxies.

It is generally thought that most of the spin-down power of a pulsar is carried away in an MHD wind dominated by Poynting flux. In the case of an oblique rotator, a significant part of this energy can be considered to be in a low-frequency wave, consisting of stripes of toroidal magnetic field of alternating polarity, propagating in a region around the equatorial plane. Magnetic reconnection in such a structure has been proposed as a mechanism for transforming the Poynting flux into particle energy in the pulsar wind. We have re-examined this process and conclude that the wind accelerates significantly in the course of reconnection. This dilates the timescale over which the reconnection process operates, so that the wind requires a much larger distance than was previously thought in order to convert the Poynting flux to particle flux. In the case of the Crab, the wind is still Poynting-dominated at the radius at which a standing shock is inferred from observation. An estimate of the radius of the termination shock for other pulsars implies that all except the milli-second pulsars have Poynting-flux dominated winds all the way out to the shock front.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap

Reconnection of the magnetic lines of force is considered in case the magnetic energy exceeds the rest energy of the matter. It is shown that the clas