Toward an Empirical Theory of Pulsar Emission. VIII. Subbeam Circulation and the Polarization‐Modal Structure of Conal Beams

The average polarization properties of conal single and double profilesdirectly reflect the polarization-modal structure of the emission beams whichproduce them. These average properties require that the circulating subbeamsystems which produce conal beams entail paired PPM and SPM emission elementswhich are offset from each other in both magnetic azimuth and magneticcolatitude. A clear delineation of the modal polarization topology of the conal beampromises to address fundamental questions about the nature and origin of thismodal emission--and the modal parity at the outer beam edges is a fact ofconsiderable significance. The different angular dependences of the modal``beamlets'' suggests that the polarization modes are generated via propagationeffects. This argument may prove much stronger if the modal emission isfundamentally only partially polarized. Several theories now promisequantitative comparison with the observations.