Thermal emission from isolated neutron stars and their surface magnetic field: Going quadrupolar?

In the last few years considerable observational resources have been devoted to study the thermal emission from isolated neutron stars. Detailed XMM and Chandra observations revealed a number of features in the X-ray pulse profile, like asymmetry, energy dependence, and possible evolution of the pulse profile over a time scale of months or years. Here we show that these characteristics may be explained by a patchy surface temperature distribution, which is expected if the magnetic field has a complex structure in which higher order multipoles contribute together with the dipole. We reconsider these effects from a theoretical point of view, and discuss their implications to the observational properties of thermally emitting neutron stars.