Deep Chandra Survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud. II. Timing Analysis of X-ray Pulsars

Abstract

We report the timing analysis results of X-ray pulsars from a recent deep Chandra survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). We have analyzed a total exposure of 1.4 Ms from 31 observations over a 1.2 deg$^2$ region in the SMC under a Chandra X-ray Visionary Program. Using the Lomb-Scargle and epoch folding techniques, we have detected periodic modulations from 20 pulsars and a new candidate pulsar. The survey also covers 11 other pulsars with no clear sign of periodic modulation. The 0.5-8 keV X-ray luminosity ($L_X$) of the pulsars ranges from $10^{34}$ to $10^{37}$ erg s$^{-1}$ at 60 kpc. All the Chandra sources with $L_X$ $\gtrsim 4 \times 10^{35}$ erg s$^{-1}$ exhibit X-ray pulsations. The X-ray spectra of the SMC pulsars (and high mass X-ray binaries) are in general harder than those of the SMC field population. All but SXP~8.02 can be fitted by an absorbed power-law model with a photon index of $\Gamma$ $\lesssim$ 1.5. The X-ray spectrum of the known magnetar SXP~8.02 is better fitted with a two-temperature blackbody model. Newly measured pulsation periods of SXP~51.0, SXP~214 and SXP~701 are significantly different from the previous XMM-Newton and RXTE measurements. This survey provides a rich data set for energy-dependent pulse profile modeling. Six pulsars show an almost eclipse-like dip in the pulse profile. Phase-resolved spectral analysis reveals diverse spectral variation during pulsation cycle: e.g., for an absorbed power-law model, some exhibit an (anti)-correlation between absorption and X-ray flux, while others show more intrinsic spectral variation.