The energy dependence of burst oscillations from the accreting millisecond pulsar XTE J1814-338

Abstract

The nature of the asymmetry that gives rise to Type I X-ray burst oscillations on accreting neutron stars remains a matter of debate. Of particular interest is whether the burst oscillation mechanism differs between the bursting millisecond pulsars and the non-pulsing systems. One means to diagnose this is to study the energy dependence of the burst oscillations: here we present an analysis of oscillations from 28 bursts observed during the 2003 outburst of the accreting millisecond pulsar XTE J1814-338. We find that the fractional amplitude of the burst oscillations falls with energy, in contrast to the behaviour found by Muno et al. in the burst oscillations from a set of non-pulsing systems. The drop with energy mirrors that seen in the accretion-powered pulsations; in this respect XTE J1814-338 behaves like the other accreting millisecond pulsars. The burst oscillations show no evidence for either hard or soft lags, in contrast to the persistent pulsations, which show soft lags of up to 50 μs. The fall in amplitude with energy is inconsistent with current surface-mode and simple hotspot models of burst oscillations. We discuss improvements to the models and uncertainties in the physics that might resolve these issues. © 2006 RAS.