Intermittent accreting millisecond pulsars: light houses with broken lamps?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the spectral and variability properties of intermittent accreting millisecond pulsars to understand why pulsations appear and disappear unpredictably, providing new observational constraints for neutron star models.

Contribution

It presents preliminary spectral and variability analyses of all known intermittent AMSPs, highlighting differences between pulsating and non-pulsating periods.

Findings

Distinct spectral signatures during pulsating and non-pulsating phases

Variability patterns correlate with pulsation states

Provides observational constraints for neutron star pulsation models

Abstract

Intermittent accreting millisecond X-ray pulsars are an exciting new type of sources. Their pulsations appear and disappear either on timescales of hundreds of seconds or on timescales of days. The study of these sources add new observational constraints to present models that explain the presence or not of pulsations in neutron star LMXBs. In this paper we present preliminary results on spectral and aperiodic variability studies of all intermittent AMSPs, with a particular focus on the comparison between pulsating and non pulsating periods.