X-ray spectra from magnetar candidates - III. Fitting SGR/AXP soft X-ray emission with non-relativistic Monte Carlo models

Abstract

Within the magnetar scenario, the 'twisted magnetosphere' model appears very promising in explaining the persistent X-ray emission from soft gamma repeaters (SGRs) and anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs). In the first two papers of the series, we have presented a 3D Monte Carlo code for solving radiation transport as soft, thermal photons emitted by the star surface are resonantly upscattered by the magnetospheric particles. A spectral model archive has been generated and implemented in xspec. Here, we report on the systematic application of our spectral model to different XMM-Newton and INTEGRAL observations of SGRs and AXPs. We find that the synthetic spectra provide a very good fit to the data for the nearly all the source (and source states) we have analysed. © 2009 RAS.