Ettore Del Monte
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08 Dec 20:12
On the Polarization Properties of Magnetar Giant Flare Pulsating Tails
by Yuan-Pei Yang and Bing Zhang
Three giant flares have been detected so far from soft gamma-ray repeaters, each characterized by an
initial short hard spike and a pulsating tail. The observed pulsating tails are characterized by a
duration of ∼100 s, an isotropic energy of ∼10 44 erg, and a pulse period of a few seconds. The
pulsating tail emission likely originates from the residual energy after the intense energy release
during the initial spike, which forms a trapped fireball composed of a photon-pair plasma in a
closed-field-line region of the magnetars. Observationally the spectra of pulsating tails can be
fitted by the superposition of a thermal component and a power-law component, with the thermal
component dominating the emission in the early and late stages of the pulsating-tail observations.
In this paper, assuming that the trapped fireball is from a closed-field-line region in the
magnetosphere, we calculate the atmospheric structure of the optically thick trapped fireball and
the polariza...
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