Phase-resolved Crab Studies with a Cryogenic TES Spectrophotometer

Abstract

We are developing time- and energy-resolved near-IR/optical/UV photon detectors based on sharp superconducting-normal transition edges in thin films. We report observations of the Crab pulsar made during prototype testing at the McDonald 2.7m telescope with a fiber-coupled transition-edge sensor (TES) system. These data show substantial (d[alpha]~0.3), rapid variations in the spectral index through the pulse profile, with a strong phase-varying IR break across our energy band. These variations correlate with X-ray spectral variations, but no single synchrotron population can account for the full Spectral Energy Distribution (SED). We also describe test spectrophotopolarimetry observations probing the energy dependence of the polarization sweep; this may provide a new key to understanding the radiating particle population.

12 pages, 10 figures -- to appear in ApJ V562

References in corpus (7)

• Observations of the Crab Nebula and its pulsar in the far-ultraviolet and in the optical
• Models for X-Ray Emission from Isolated Pulsars
• First Astronomical Application of a Cryogenic TES Spectrophotometer
• Synchrotron Model for the Infrared, Optical and X-Ray Emission of the Crab Pulsar
• Unpulsed UBV Optical Emission from the Crab Pulsar
• Optical Spectrum of Main-, Inter- and Off-pulse Emission from Crab Pulsar
• A Next Generation High-speed Data Acquisition System for Multi-channel Infrared and Optical Photometry

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• Phonon-trapping enhanced energy resolution in superconducting single photon detectors
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• Relativistic effects and polarization in three high-energy pulsar models
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• High-time Resolution Astrophysics and Pulsars
• Optical and Near-IR Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) in the 2020s
• Hard X-ray Polarimetry -- An overview of the method, science drivers and recent findings
• Membrane-less phonon trapping and resolution enhancement in optical microwave kinetic inductance detectors