English

Constraining the slow-diffusion zone size and electron injection spectral index for the Geminga pulsar halo

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2026-04-21 v2

Abstract

Measuring the electron diffusion coefficient is the most straightforward task in the study of gamma-ray pulsar halos. The updated measurements of the spatial morphology and spectrum of the Geminga halo by the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) experiment enable us to constrain parameters beyond the diffusion coefficient, including the size of the slow-diffusion zone and the electron injection spectrum from the pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe). Based on the two-zone diffusion model, we find that the slow-diffusion zone size (rr_*) around Geminga is within the range of 307030-70~pc. The lower boundary of this range is determined by the goodness of fit of the model to the one-dimensional morphology of the Geminga halo. The upper limit is derived from fitting the gamma-ray spectrum of the Geminga halo, along with the expectations for the power-law index of the injection spectrum based on simulations and PWNe observations, i.e., p1p\gtrsim1. With rr_* set at its lower limit of 3030~pc, we obtain the maximum pp permitted by the HAWC spectrum measurement, with an upper limit of 2.172.17 at a 3σ3\sigma significance. Moreover, we find that when r=30r_*=30~pc and p=2.17p=2.17, the predicted positron spectrum generated by Geminga at Earth coincides with the AMS-02 measurement in the 5050050-500~GeV range.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.16594,
  title  = {Constraining the slow-diffusion zone size and electron injection spectral index for the Geminga pulsar halo},
  author = {Kun Fang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.16594},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

15 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in PRD