The X-ray behaviour of Fermi/LAT pulsars

Abstract

More than 40 years after the discovery of Isolated Neutron Stars, the comprehension of their physics is still rather poor. This thesis is based on a program of multiwavelength observations of pulsars which yielded new and important pieces of information about the overall proprieties of this class of sources. The thesis is organized as follows: - In chapter 1 we give a very brief overview of the current status of the understanding of Isolated Neutron Stars. We also talk about the Fermi revolution that occurred in the last three years, focusing on the Fermi contribution to the knowledge of neutron stars. Then, we describe the results led by the synergy between X-ray and gamma-ray bands. - In chapter 2 we report two of our published papers containing the surprising results we obtained for two different radio-quiet pulsars. Such neutron stars, J0007+7303 and J0357+3205, can be considered "extreme" in the Fermi pulsars' zoo due to their energetics and ages. Both the X-ray observations and analyses are very different so that they can be considered as the standing-up examples of all the following analyses. - In chapter 3 we describe the analysis we done in the X-ray band and briefly report the obtained spectra of each pulsar and its nebula, if present. Then, we study the X-ray and gamma-ray pulsars' luminosities as a function of their rotational energies and ages in order to find any relationship between these values and any difference between the two populations of radio-quiet and radio-loud pulsars. - In chapter 4 we report the "identity card" of all Fermi pulsars, the detailed description of the analyses done and results obtained for each pulsar. Finally, in appendix we report our accepted proposals of the most significative X-ray observations used in this thesis plus the article on the X-ray behaviour of Fermi/LAT pulsars we published on the Astrophyisical Journal.

Ph.D. thesis submitted to the University of Insubria, Como, Italy; advisor Patrizia Caraveo; defended September 13, 2011. 302 pages, 161 figures, 11 tables

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• Timing Gamma-ray Pulsars with the Fermi Large Area Telescope: Timing Noise and Astrometry
• PSR J0357+3205: the tail of the turtle
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• X-ray Spectra and Multiwavelength Machine Learning Classification for Likely Counterparts to Fermi 3FGL Unassociated Sources
• X-ray bounds on the r-mode amplitude in millisecond pulsars
• Observations of three young gamma-ray pulsars with the Gran Telescopio Canarias
• Optical Observations of PSR J0205+6449 - the next optical pulsar?
• X-ray studies of the gamma-ray pulsar J1826-1256 and its pulsar wind nebula with Chandra and XMM-Newton
• Jet-like structures from PSR J1135-6055
• New VLT observations of the Fermi pulsar PSR J1048-5832
• Phase-Averaged Gamma-Ray Spectra from MSPs
• Classifying Unidentified Gamma-ray Sources