Neutron star parameter constraints for accretion-powered millisecond pulsars from the simulated IXPE data

TL;DR

This study simulates X-ray polarization data from IXPE for accretion-powered millisecond pulsars, assessing how observational parameters affect measurement accuracy and how polarization data can constrain neutron star geometry.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed simulation-based analysis of IXPE's capabilities to measure neutron star parameters from polarization data, including error scaling and geometric constraints.

Findings

Relative errors in Stokes parameters decrease as 1/√t with observation time.

Geometrical parameters can be constrained within 10 degrees accuracy.

Polarization data can improve neutron star mass and radius estimates.

Abstract

We have simulated the X-ray polarization data that can be obtained with the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, when observing accretion-powered millisecond pulsars. We estimated the necessary exposure times for SAX J1808.4$-$3658 in order to obtain different accuracies in the measured time-dependent Stokes profiles integrated over all energy channels. We found that the measured relative errors depend strongly on the relative configuration of the observer and the emitting hotspot. The improvement in the minimum relative error in Stokes $Q$ and $U$ parameters as a function of observing time $t$ scales as $1/\sqrt{t}$, and spans the range from 30-90% with 200 ks exposure time to 20-60% with 500 ks exposure time (in case of data binned in 19 phase bins). The simulated data were also used to predict how accurate measurements of the geometrical parameters of the neutron star can be made when modelling only $Q$ and $U$ parameters, but not the flux. We found that the observer inclination and the hotspot co-latitude could be determined with better than 10 deg accuracy for most of the cases we considered. These measurements can be used to further constrain neutron star mass and radius when combined with modelling of the X-ray pulse profile.