Speaker
Description
X-ray binaries are a source of variable radio emission produced by an accreting compact object, a neutron star or a black hole. The radiation from the jets varies both stochastically and as a result of Type-I X-ray bursts (thermonuclear explosions on the neutron stars). The main purpose of this work is to attempt to understand the effects of Type-I X-ray bursts on the jets using internal shock models. These models assume that the main mechanism for the energization of the jets are collisions of plasma shells generated at the base of the jet with different initial velocities. Previous work has shown that they succeeded in reproducing several important observational features of the radiation produced by the X-ray binaries; namely, the flat spectrum of the synchrotron emission, the high-frequency turnover in the spectrum, and certain correlations between the synchrotron flux and the total jet power, along with correctly reproducing delays in the appearance of IR radiation. This is still work in progress, and I am currently working on first reproducing the results of the previous models to ensure the correctness of my code. The next step would be to modify and use the code in an attempt to model the radio burst generation itself, exploring various scenarios and parameters of the model.
