Exploring the effects of magnetar bursts in pulsar wind nebulae

TL;DR

This paper investigates how magnetar bursts could temporarily enhance the emission of pulsar wind nebulae across multiple wavelengths, providing insights into their transient behavior and potential links to fast radio bursts.

Contribution

It introduces a phenomenological model for magnetar burst effects on PWNe, focusing on energy injection, spectral properties, and decay times, with implications for understanding FRBs.

Findings

Magnetar bursts can increase PWN X-ray flux by about tenfold.

The decay time of enhanced flux depends on energy injection parameters.

Possible explanations for the absence of PWNe around some magnetars are proposed.

Abstract

We explore possible effects of a magnetar burst on the radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray flux of a pulsar wind nebula (PWN). We assume that the burst injects electron-positron pairs or powers the magnetic field and explore the total energy at injection and the spectral index needed in order to increase the X-ray flux by about one order of magnitude, as well as its decay time until reaching quiescence. We also explore magnetically powered phenomenology that could explain a temporary increase of the PWN synchrotron emitted flux and perhaps the relatively common lack of PWNe surrounding magnetars. This phenomenological study is of interest for fast radio bursts (FRBs) as well, given that the connection between magnetars and this kind of systems have been recently established observationally.