Discovery of millihertz Quasi-Periodic Oscillations in the Low Mass X-Ray Binary XTE J1701$-$462 from a Search of the RXTE Legacy data set

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of millihertz quasi-periodic oscillations in the low-mass X-ray binary XTE J1701-462, revealing new insights into accretion regimes and nuclear burning processes during its outburst.

Contribution

It presents the first detection of mHz QPOs in XTE J1701-462 from RXTE data, linking these oscillations to accretion states and nuclear burning regimes.

Findings

Detected 47 observations with significant mHz QPOs

QPO frequencies ranged from 3.5 to 5.6 mHz

QPOs and bursts occurred in separate accretion regimes

Abstract

We report the detection of millihertz quasi-periodic oscillations ($\mathrm{mHz}$ QPOs) from the low-mass X-ray binary XTE J1701$-$462. The discovery came from a search of the legacy data set of the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, in order to detect the periodic signals in all observations of sources exhibiting thermonuclear bursts. We found that $47$ out of $860$ observations of XTE J1701$-$462; covering the 2006-7 outburst exhibits signals with a significance above the detection threshold, which was determined separately for each observation via a Monte Carlo approach. We chose the four strongest candidates, each with maximum power exceeding $4\sigma$ of the simulated wavelet noise power distribution, to demonstrate the properties of the QPOs. The frequencies of the signals in the four observations are $\sim 3.5\;\text{to}\;5.6\; \mathrm{mHz}$, and the fractional R.M.S. amplitudes vary between $0.74 \pm 0.05\,\%$ and $3.54 \pm 0.04\,\%$. Although previously reported signals in other sources typically disappear immediately before a burst, we do not observe this behaviour in XTE J1701$-$462. Instead, we found that the QPOs and bursts occurred in separate accretion regimes. When the persistent luminosity dropped near the end of the outburst, the source showed bursts and no QPOs were detected, which is the behaviour predicted by theory for the transition from stable to unstable burning. On the basis of this new detection, we reassess the cases for identifying these $\mathrm{mHz}$ QPOs in this and other sources as arising from marginally stable burning.