Photon Interval Statistics Measure Rapid Variability
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
2025-03-05 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Abstract
Modern X-ray and gamma-ray observatories time-tag detected photons. The distribution of intervals between successive photons may reveal variations of the flux on time scales too short for direct flux measurement of the mean count rate, provided a sufficient number of photons have been detected cumulatively. We demonstrate this with synthetic data and apply to RXTE data from Cyg X-1.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.02045,
title = {Photon Interval Statistics Measure Rapid Variability},
author = {J. I. Katz and M. Nowak},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.02045},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
4 pp., 7 figs