Polarization of the Crab Pulsar and Nebula as Observed by the INTEGRAL/IBIS Telescope
By M. Forot, P. Laurent, I. Grenier, C. Gouiffès, F. Lebrun. 2008
166 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Neutron stars generate powerful winds of relativistic particles that form bright synchrotron nebulae around them. Polarimetry provides a unique insight into the geometry and magnetic configuration of the wind, but high-energy measurements have failed until recently. The INTEGRAL/IBIS telescope has been used in its Compton mode to search for linearly polarized emission for energies above 200 keV from the Crab Nebula. The asymmetries in the instrument response are small and we obtain evidence for a strongly polarized signal at an angle parallel to the pulsar rotation axis. This result confirms the detection recently reported by Dean and coworkers, and extends the polarization measure for all the pulsar’s phases. The hard X-ray/soft γ-ray observations therefore probe the inner jets or equatorial flow of the wind. The achieved sensitivity opens a new window for polarimetric studies at energies above 200 keV.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/82b72b1da87ec2adc464fcf50673774d54eab3ee
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
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Citations in the corpus
- The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) (2016, background): “At soft--ray energies, un-polarization-calibrated detectors serving as Compton polarimeters [6,7] reported linear polarization from a few very bright sources—the Crab Nebula [8], Cygnus X-1 [9], and -ray bursts (GRBs) [10,11,12] although none of these latter results are completely unambiguous.”
- Tests of Lorentz invariance: a 2013 update (2013, background): “6× 10 at 95% Confidence Level (CL) was obtained by considering the observed polarization of hard-X rays [163] (see also [164]).”
- Analyzing the data from X-ray polarimeters with Stokes parameters (2014, background): “Since then, three more X-ray polarization measurements have been published: In 2008, the instruments SPI and IBIS on board the INTEGRAL satellite reported polarization fractions of the Crab Nebula of 46 ± 10% [5] and >72% [6], respectively, with the polarization direction aligned with the X-ray jet.”