Global Kinetic Modeling of the Intrabinary Shock in Spider Pulsars

Spider pulsars are compact binary systems composed of a millisecond pulsar and a low mass companion. The relativistic and strongly magnetized pulsar wind impacts onto the companion, ablating it and slowly consuming its atmosphere. This interaction gives rise to the formation of an intrabinary shock, a proposed site of nonthermal emission and particle acceleration. We perform global fully-kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of the interaction of a striped pulsar wind with the companion star. We present first-principles synchrotron spectra and light curves, which closely match the observations if the orbital angular momentum is nearly aligned with the pulsar spin axis.