Effects of Resonance in Quasiperiodic Oscillators of Neutron Star Binaries.pdfVIP

Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters 2002 August 22 Effects of Resonance in Quasiperiodic Oscillators of Neutron Star Binaries 2 Lev Titarchuk 1,2 0 0 2 g ABSTRACT u A 2 Using a large quantity of Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer data presented in the 2 literature I offer a detailed investigation into the accuracy of quasiperiodic oscil- 1 lations (QPO) frequency determination. The QPO phenomenon seen in X-ray v binaries is possibly a result of the resonance of the intrinsic (eigen) oscillations 3 2 and harmonic driving forces of the system. I show that the resonances, in the 4 8 presence of the damping of oscillations, occur at the frequencies which are sys- 0 tematically and randomly shifted with respect to the eigenfrequencies of the 2 0 system. The shift value strongly depends on the damping rate which is measured / h by the halfwidth of the QPO feature. Taking into account this effect I analyze p- the QPO data for four Z-sources: Sco X-1, GX 340+0, GX 5-1, GX 17+2 and o two atoll sources: 4U 1728-34, 4U 0614+09. The transition layer model (TLM) r t s predicts the existence of the invariant quantity: δ , an inclination angle of the a : magnetospheric axis with respect to the normal to the disk. I calculate δ and v i the error bars of δ using the resonance shift and I find that the inferred δ−values X are consistent with constants for these four Z-sources, where horizonta