The game of life on a magnetar crust: from $\gamma$-ray flares to FRBs

Abstract

This paper presents a model to unify the diverse range of magnetar activity, through the building and release of elastic stress from the crust. A cellular automaton drives both local and global yielding of the crust, leading to braiding of coronal loops and energy release. The model behaves like a real magnetar in many ways: giant flares and small bursts both occur, as well as periods of quiescence whose typical duration is either $\lesssim 1$ yr or $\sim 10-30$ yr. The burst energy distribution broadly follows an earthquake-like power law over the energy range $10^{40}-10^{45}\mathrm{erg}$. The local nature of coronal loops allows for the possibility of high-energy and fast radio bursts from the same magnetar. Within this paradigm, magnetar observations can be used to constrain the poorly-understood mechanical properties of the neutron-star crust.

6 pages, 5 figures. Matches version now published in ApJ Letters. Animations related to figure 3 available here: sklander.wordpress.com/animations/

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Force-free wave interaction in magnetar magnetospheres: Computational modeling in axisymmetry
• Hyper-active repeating fast radio bursts from rotation modulated starquakes on magnetars
• The Galactic population of magnetars : a simulation-based inference study
• Influence of Dark Matter on the Magnetized Neutron Star
• Concise Spectrotemporal Studies of Magnetar SGR J1935+2154 Bursts
• Magnetar Outburst Models with Cooling Simulations
• Correlation of Burst Behaviour with Magnetar Age
• Investigating the Recursive Short X-ray Burst Behavior of Magnetars Through Crustal Interactions