This is the implementation by Carlo Ferrigno of the model by Becker & Wolff (2007). This implementation has been validated in Ferrigno, Becker et al. (2009)
The original model is described in P. A. Becker & M. Wolff Thermal and Bulk Comptonization in Accretion-powered X-Ray Pulsars 2007, ApJ 654, 435B.
The application details are reported in C. Ferrigno, P. A. Becker, A. Segreto, T. Mineo & A. Santangelo, Study of the accreting pulsar 4U 0115+63 using a bulk and thermal Comptonization model, 2009, A&A, 498, 825 .
It is mandatory to:
The computation of the black-body source term is time consuming, because it involves the numerical solution of an integral. Since the contribution of this component is generally negligible, the parameter BBnorm should be set to zero and then fixed to one for the final runs. The parameters FFnorm and CYCnorm should be fixed to one.6.1
The mass accretion rate is strongly degenerate with the accretion column radius and the parameter
; it is therefore advisable to fix
to a suitable value, which can be derived by equaling the X-ray luminosity to the accretion luminosity. For a source in which the magnetic field is well above the plasma temperature and the contribution by the cyclotron emission term is minor, it is suggested to link the magnetic field of the continuum model to the one derived by the cyclotron scattering absorption feature(s).
For particular combinations of the parameters and
, the special functions used in the GSL libraries do not converge and an error is issued; such as if
is very low and
very high, or vice-versa. In these cases, the model returns NAN values to XSPEC, with a message, but the program does not exit. This apparently happens mostly for large values of
. It is therefore important to limit the parameter ranges in a customary way and maybe tune the mass accretion rate to a value which keeps these parameters in the range suggested by physical considerations. Equaling the accretion and the X-ray luminosities is not guaranteed to yield meaningful results for all sources.
par1 |
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par2 |
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par7 |
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par10 | BBnorm : Normalization of the blackbody seed photon component (fix it to zero at first) |
par11 | CYCnorm : Normalization of the cyclotron emission seed photon component (fix it to one) |
par12 | FFnorm : Normalization of the Bremsstrahlung emission seed photon component (fix it to one) |
Contacts
For any problem and suggestions, please contact
Carlo Ferrigno
email: carlo.ferrigno@unige.ch