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New simultaneous X-ray and radio observations of the archetypal mode-switching pulsar PSR B0943+10 have been carried out with XMM-Newton and the LOFAR, LWA and Arecibo radio telescopes in November 2014. They allowed us to better constrain the X-ray spectral and variability properties of this pulsar and to detect, for the first time, the X-ray pulsations also during the X-ray-fainter mode. The combined timing and spectral analysis indicates that unpulsed non-thermal emission, likely of magnetospheric origin, and pulsed thermal emission from a small polar cap are present during both radio modes and vary in a correlated way.
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Observations obtained in the last years challenged the widespread notion that rotation-powered neutron stars are steady X-ray emitters. Besides a few allegedly rotation-powered neutron stars that showed magnetar-like variability, a particularly interesting case is that of PSR B0943+10. Recent observations have shown that this pulsar, well studied in the radio band where it alternates between a bright and a quiescent mode, displays significant X-ray variations, anticorrelated in flux with the radio emission. The study of such synchronous radio/X-ray mode switching opens a new window to investigate the processes responsible for the pulsar radio and high-energy emission. Here we review the main X-ray properties of PSR B0943+10 derived from recent coordinated X-ray and radio observations.
We report on simultaneous X-ray and radio observations of the mode-switching pulsar PSR B0943+10 obtained with the XMM-Newton satellite and the LOFAR, LWA and Arecibo radio telescopes in November 2014. We confirm the synchronous X-ray/radio switching between a radio-bright (B) and a radio-quiet (Q) mode, in which the X-ray flux is a factor ~2.4 higher than in the B-mode. We discovered X-ray pulsations, with pulsed fraction of 38+/-5% (0.5-2 keV), during the B-mode, and confirm their presence in Q-mode, where the pulsed fraction increases with energy from ~20% up to ~65% at 2 keV. We found marginal evidence for an increase in the X-ray pulsed fraction during B-mode on a timescale of hours. The Q-mode X-ray spectrum requires a fit with a two-component model (either a power-law plus blackbody or the sum of two blackbodies), while the B-mode spectrum is well fit by a single blackbody (a single power-law is rejected). With a maximum likelihood analysis, we found that in Q-mode the pulsed emission has a thermal blackbody spectrum with temperature ~3.4x10^6 K and the unpulsed emission is a power-law with photon index ~2.5, while during B-mode both the pulsed and unpulsed emission can be fit by either a blackbody or a power law with similar values of temperature and photon index. A Chandra image shows no evidence for diffuse X-ray emission. These results support a scenario in which both unpulsed non-thermal emission, likely of magnetospheric origin, and pulsed thermal emission from a small polar cap (~1500 m^2) with a strong non-dipolar magnetic field (~10^{14} G), are present during both radio modes and vary in intensity in a correlated way. This is broadly consistent with the predictions of the partially screened gap model and does not necessarily imply global magnetospheric rearrangements to explain the mode switching.
This paper reports on polarimetric radiation properties based on the switching modes of normal PSR B2020+28 by analysing the data acquired from the Nanshan 25-m radio telescope at 1556 MHz. With nearly 8 hours quasi-continuous observation, the data presented some striking and updated phenomena. The change of relative intensity between the leading and trailing components is the predominant feature of mode switching. The intensity ratio between the leading and trailing components are measured for the individual profiles averaged over 30 seconds. It is found that there is an excess of high ratios over the normal distribution, which indicates that two modes exist in the pulsar. The distribution of abnormal mode has a narrower width indicating that the abnormal mode is more stable than the normal mode. A total of 76 mode switching events are detected in our data. It spends 89% in the normal mode and 11% in the abnormal mode. The intrinsic distributions of mode timescales are constrained with power-law distributions. The significant difference in the index of the duration distribution between normal and abnormal modes possibly indicates that the timescale for the abnormal mode to get stable is shorter than that for the normal mode. The frequent switching between both modes may indicate that the oscillations between different magnetospheric states are rapid.
The young pulsar PSR B1828-11 has long been known to show correlated shape and spin-down changes with timescales of roughly 500 and 250 days, perhaps associated with large-scale magnetospheric switching. Here we present multi-hour observations with the Parkes and Green Bank Telescopes at multiple phases across the roughly 500-day cycle and show that the pulsar undergoes mode-changing between two stable, extreme profile states. The fraction of time spent in each profile state naturally accounts for the observed overall shape parameter (defined to be 0 for wide profiles and 1 for narrow ones); this and the variable rate of the mode transitions are directly related to the spin-down changes. We observe that the mode transition rate could plausibly function as an additional parameter governing the chaotic behaviour in this object which was proposed earlier by Seymour and Lorimer. Free precession is not needed to account for the variations.
A recent X-ray observation has shown that the radio pulsar PSR B0943+10, with clear drifting subpulses, has a much smaller polar cap area than that of conventional pulsars with mass of $simmsun$ and radius of $sim10$ km. Zhang et al. (2005) addressed then that this new result conflicts with the standard vacuum gap model. Nonetheless, the discrepancy could be explained if PSR B0943+10 is actually a low-mass quark star. It is found that the potential drop in the open-field-line region of oblique pulsars (i.e., inclination angle $alpha eq 0$) might be $sim 10^2$ times that of aligned pulsars, and that PSR B0943+10 with $alpha = 12.4^{rm o}$ could be well above the deathline. We thus conclude that the Ruderman-Sutherland-type vacuum gap model still works well for this pulsar if it is a bare quark star with a mass of $sim 0.02M_odot$ and a radius of $sim 2.6$ km.
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