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Morphological analysis on the coherence of kHz QPOs

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Abstract

We take the recently published data of twin kHz quasi-period oscillations (QPOs) in neutron star (NS) low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) as the samples, and investigate the morphology of the samples, which focuses on the quality factor, peak frequency of kHz QPOs, and try to infer their physical mechanism. We notice that: (1) The quality factors of upper kHz QPOs are low (2∼20 in general) and increase with the kHz QPO peak frequencies for both Z and Atoll sources. (2) The distribution of quality factor versus frequency for the lower kHz QPOs are quite different between Z and Atoll sources. For most Z source samples, the quality factors of lower kHz QPOs are low (usually lower than 15) and rise steadily with the peak frequencies except for Sco X-1, which drop abruptly at the frequency of about 750 Hz. While for most Atoll sources, the quality factors of lower kHz QPOs are very high (from 2 to 200) and usually have a rising part, a maximum and an abrupt drop. (3) There are three Atoll sources (4U 1728-34, 4U 1636-53 and 4U 1608-52) of displaying very high quality factors for lower kHz QPOs. These three sources have been detected with the spin frequencies and sidebands, in which the source with higher spin frequency presents higher quality factor of lower kHz QPOs and lower difference between sideband frequency and lower kHz QPO frequency.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge M. Mendez and D. Barret for providing the data. It is also a pleasure to thank M.A. Abramowicz, G.Q. Ding, J. Horák and W. Kluźniak for helpful discussions. This work is supported by National Basic Research Program of China (2009CB824800, 2012CB821800), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC 10773017, NSFC 10773034, NSFC 10778716, NSFC 11173024), NSC 99-2112-M-007-017-MY3 and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Astronomy, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, 30013, Taiwan

    J. Wang & H. K. Chang

  2. National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100012, China

    C. M. Zhang & D. H. Wang

  3. Astronomy Department, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    D. H. Wang & L. Chen

  4. Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    J. L. Qu & L. M. Song

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  1. J. Wang
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Correspondence to D. H. Wang.

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Wang, J., Chang, H.K., Zhang, C.M. et al. Morphological analysis on the coherence of kHz QPOs. Astrophys Space Sci 342, 357–364 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-012-1173-8

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