First detection of the Crab pulsar above 25 GeV with the MAGIC Telescope

Third International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

Marcos López Moya ; Thomas Schweizer ; Nepomuk Otte ; Maxim Shayduk ; Michael Rissi

Others  :  http://pos.sissa.it/archive/conferences/078/006/CRAB2008_006.pdf
PID  :  9682

来源: CEUR

【 摘 要 】

For the first time, pulsed γ-rays above 25 GeV from the Crab pulsar have been detected with the MAGIC telescope [1]. All Crab pulsar emission models predict that the energy spectrum of the pulsed emission drops off sharply somewhere between a few GeV and a few tens of GeV. The lack of experimental data at the relevant energies prevented so far the discrimination between the different theoretical scenarios of γ-ray emission in pulsars. The MAGIC measurements reveal that the drop-off in the emitted radiation occurs at relatively high energies, which indicates that the emission must occur far out in the Crab pulsar’s magnetosphere. All models in which the emitting region is located close to the Crab pulsar’s surface (e.g., the so-called polar cap model) are ruled out by the MAGIC results. [first paragraph]