2006A&A...450L...1C

In this letter we discuss two possible reasons which cause the observed braking indices n of young radio pulsars to be smaller than 3: (a) the evolving spin-down model of the magnetic field component B_{{perpendicular}} increases with time; (b) the extrinsic braking torque model in which the tidal torques exerted on the pulsar by the fallback disk, and carries away the spin angular momentum from the pulsar. Based on some simple assumptions, we derive the expression of the braking indices, and calculate the spin-down evolutionary tracks of pulsars for different input parameters.