A redback system is a binary system composed of a pulsar and a main sequence star. The inverse Compton (IC) scattering between the stellar soft photons and the relativistic pulsar wind will generate orbital-modulating GeV photons. We look for these IC emissions from redback systems. A multi-wavelength observation of an unassociated gamma-ray source, 3FGL J2039.6-5618, by Salvetti et al. (2015) detected an orbital modulation with a period of 0.2 days in both X-ray and optical cases. They suggested 3FGL J2039.6-5618 to be a new redback candidate. We analyzed the gamma-ray emission of 3FGL J2039.6-5618 using the data from the Fermi large area telescope (Fermi-LAT) and obtained the spectrum in different orbital phases. We propose that the spectrum has orbital dependency and estimate the characteristic energy of the IC emission from the stellar-pulsar wind interaction.
It is generally believed that the high energy emissions from isolated pulsars are emitted from relativistic electrons/positrons accelerated in outer magnetospheric accelerators (outergaps) via a curvature radiation mechanism, which has a simple exponential cut-off spectrum. However, many gamma-ray pulsars detected by the Fermi LAT (Large Area Telescope) cannot be fitted by simple exponential cut-off spectrum, and instead a sub-exponential is more appropriate. It is proposed that the realistic outergaps are non-stationary, and that the observed spectrum is a superposition of different stationary states that are controlled by the currents injected from the inner and outer boundaries. The Vela and Geminga pulsars have the largest fluxes among all targets observed, which allows us to carry out very detailed phase-resolved spectral analysis. We have divided the Vela and Geminga pulsars into 19 (the off pulse of Vela was not included) and 33 phase bins, respectively. We find that most phase resolved spectra still cannot be fitted by a simple exponential spectrum: in fact, a sub-exponential spectrum is necessary. We conclude that non-stationary states exist even down to the very fine phase bins.
We use the non-stationary three dimensional two-layer outer gap model to explain gamma-ray emissions from a pulsar magnetosphere. We found out that for some pulsars like the Geminga pulsar, it was hard to explain emissions above a level of around 1 GeV. We then developed the model into a non-stationary model. In this model we assigned a power-law distribution to one or more of the spectral parameters proposed in the previous model and calculated the weighted phaseaveraged spectrum. Though this model is suitable for some pulsars, it still cannot explain the high energy emission of the Geminga pulsar. An Inverse-Compton Scattering component between the primary particles and the radio photons in the outer magnetosphere was introduced into the model, and this component produced a sufficient number of GeV photons in the spectrum of the Geminga pulsar.