Search for gamma-ray emission from four accreting millisecond pulsars with Fermi/LAT

Yi Xing, Zhongxiang Wang

Published 2012-11-27, updated 2013-04-08Version 2

We report our search for \gamma-ray emission in the energy range from 100 MeV to 300 GeV from four Accreting Millisecond Pulsars (AMPs), SAX J1808.4-3658, IGR J00291+5934, XTE J1814-338, and XTE J0929-314. The data are from four-year observations carried out by Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard the Fermi \gamma-ray Space Telescope. The AMPs were not detected, and their \gamma-ray luminosity upper limits we obtain are 5.1*10^33 ergs/s for SAX J1808.4-3658, 2.1*10^33 ergs/s for IGR J00291+5934, 1.2*10^34 ergs/s for XTE J1814-338, and 2.2*10^33 ergs/s for XTE J0929-314. We compare our results with \gamma-ray irradiation luminosities required for producing optical modulations seen from the companions in the AMPs, which has been suggested by Takata et al. (2012), and our upper limits have excluded \gamma-ray emission as the heating source in these systems except XTE J0929-314, the upper limit of which is not deep enough. Our results also do not support the model proposed by Takata et al. (2012) that relatively strong \gamma-ray emission could arise from the outer gap of a high-mass neutron star controlled by the photon-photon pair-creation for the AMPs. Two AMPs, SAX J1808.4-3658 and IGR J00291+5934, have the measurements of their spin-down rates, and we derive the upper limits of their \gamma-ray conversion efficiencies, which are 57% and 3%, respectively. We discuss the implications to the AMP systems by comparing the efficiency upper limit values with that of 20 \gamma-ray millisecond pulsars (MSP) detected by Fermi and the newly discovered transitional MSP binary J1023+0038.