Spectral characterization of the non-thermal X-ray emission of gamma-ray pulsars

TL;DR

This study provides a comprehensive spectral analysis of non-thermal X-ray emissions from gamma-ray pulsars, using archival data to inform and test theoretical models of pulsar emission mechanisms.

Contribution

It offers a systematic spectral characterization of a large pulsar sample, with data publicly available for further theoretical and observational studies.

Findings

Detailed spectral distributions for numerous gamma-ray pulsars.

Methodological framework for spectral shape and flux estimation.

Data set available online for community use.

Abstract

We report on a detailed spectral characterization of the non-thermal X-ray emission for a large sample of gamma-ray pulsars in the second Fermi-LAT catalogue. We outline the criteria adopted for the selection of our sample, its completeness, and critically describe different approaches to estimate the spectral shape and flux of pulsars. We perform a systematic modelling of the pulsars' X-ray spectra using archival observations with XMM-Newton, Chandra, and NuSTAR and extract the corresponding non-thermal X-ray spectral distributions. This set of data is made available online and is useful to confront with predictions of theoretical models.