Speaker
Description
‘Spider’ binary systems – black widow and redback binaries consisting of a millisecond pulsar and a low-mass companion in a compact orbit, are important types of pulsar system exhibiting various key features, including radio eclipses, optical light curves from the heated companion, and X-ray and GeV orbital light curves and spectra. In these systems, the intense pulsar wind heats and may ablate its companion, forming an intra-binary shock as a promising site for particle acceleration. The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) has detected about 50 of these systems in the GeV band. We will extend our basic model of shock emission (Van der Merwe et al., 2020) to include updated injection spectra and shock geometries, and calculate synchrotron and inverse Compton spectral components as well as energy-dependent orbital light curves expected from a number of these systems.
