Abstract for Proposal 087203
Hunting for transitional millisecond pulsars with XMM-Newton and NuStar
Three millisecond pulsars have recently shown to swing between
an accretion (X-ray) and a rotation powered (radio) pulsar state,
demonstrating that transitions between these two states can be observed
over timescales as short as a few weeks. Unexpectedly, the accretion
disk state of transitional millisecond pulsars is often sub-luminous in
X-rays. Only a small fraction of the disk in-flow is accreted onto the
NS surface, while the rest is most probably ejected by the quickly
rotating magnetosphere. In this state a bright high energy emission
ranging up to few GeVs is also observed.
Details on Observing Strategy and Trigger Criteria
The INTEGRAL/XMM ToO observation will be triggered as soon as the 0.3-8.0 keV
flux exceeds 2E-11 erg/cm2/s (1mCrab). A reaction time of <5 days after the
trigger is requested to avoid that the source fades too much for a signal
search. Only one ToO observation is requested out of the 49 targets listed.