Related papers: Super-Eddington Radiation Transfer in Soft Gamma R…
Observed intensities and inferred distances of soft gamma repeaters imply luminosities in excess of the nominal (electron-scattering opacity) Eddington limit by four to six orders of magnitude. I review the physical basis of this limit.…
I summarize the recent advances in our understanding of the Soft Gamma Repeaters: in particular their spin behavior, persistent emission and hyper-Eddington outbursts. The giant flares on 5 March 1979 and 27 August 1998 provide compelling…
The association of all three soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs) with supernova remnants has made possible estimates of the distance to and luminosity of the sources of SGRs, which have provided a starting point for detailed modeling. One of…
The recent association of soft gamma repeaters (SGRs) with counterparts in other wavebands has sparked much interest in these sources. One of the recent models for these objects is that they originate in the environs of neutron stars with…
Neutron stars have inferred surface magnetic fields of up to 10^{14} Gauss, in the case of radio pulsars, and up to possibly 10^{15} Gauss, in the case of Soft Gamma-Ray Repeaters and Anomalous X-ray Pulsars. In fields this high, QED…
Soft Gamma Repeaters (SGRs) are a class of rare, high-energy galactic transients that have episodes of short (~0.1 sec), soft (~30 keV), intense (~100 Crab), gamma-ray bursts. We report an analysis of the x-ray emission from 95 SGR1806-20…
There are several phenomenological similarities between Soft Gamma Repeaters and Fast Radio Bursts, including duty factors, time scales and probable repetition. The sudden release of magnetic energy in a neutron star magnetosphere, as in…
It has been known for nearly three decades that the energy spectra of thermonuclear X-ray bursts are often well-fit by Planck functions with temperatures so high that they imply a super-Eddington radiative flux at the emitting surface, even…
Quiescence and burst emission and relativistic particle winds of soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs) have been widely interpreted to result from ultrastrongly magnetized neutron stars. In this magnetar model, the magnetic energy and…
The association of all three soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs) with supernova remnants has established that SGRs are young neutron stars, and has given us a starting point for detailed modeling. One of the most popular classes of models…
We propose a model to account for the bursts from soft gamma repeaters (SGRs) and anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs) in which quantum electrodynamics (QED) plays a vital role. In our theory, that we term ``fast-mode breakdown,''…
The spectra of soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs), with the exception of the March 5, 1979 main burst, are characterized by high-energy cutoffs around 30 keV and low-energy turnovers that are much steeper than a Wien spectrum. Baring (1995)…
Soft gamma repeaters and anomalous x-ray pulsars form a rapidly increasing group of x-ray sources exhibiting sporadic emission of short bursts. They are believed to be magnetars, i.e. neutron stars powered by extreme magnetic fields,…
The magnetosphere of strongly magnetized neutron stars, such as magnetars, can sustain large electric currents. The charged particles return to the surface with large Lorentz factors, producing a particle bombardment. We investigate the…
The scattering of electromagnetic radiation by the particle gyrating in an external magnetic field is considered. Particular attention is paid to the low-frequency case, when the frequencies of incident radiation are much less than the…
Bursts and flares are among the distinctive observational manifestations of magnetars, isolated neutron stars endowed with an ultra-strong magnetic field ($B \approx 10^{14}$--$10^{15}$ G). It is believed that these events arise in a hot…
Radiation dominated accretion disks are likely to be subject to the ``photon bubble'' instability, which may lead to strong density inhomogeneities on scales much shorter than the disk scale height. Such disks -- and magnetized,…
The exotic quantum process of photon splitting has great potential to explain the softness of emission in soft gamma repeaters (SGRs) if they originate in neutron stars with surface fields above the quantum critical field $B_{\rm…
It is suggested that the persistent X-ray emission from the soft gamma-ray repeaters is the thermal radiation of neutron stars which is enhanced by a factor of 10 or more due to the effect of a very strong magnetic field on the thermal…
The effects of radiative energy exchange on the convective instability of a weak field magnetic structure, which lead to a prediction and a physical explanation of the magnetic flux dependent field strength, are examined in detail using a…