Spatially-dependent multi-wavelength modeling of pulsar wind nebulae
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North-West University (South Africa), Potchefstroom Campus
Abstract
The next era of ground-based Cherenkov telescope development will see a great increase
in both quantity and quality of γ-ray morphological data. This initiated the development
of a spatio-temporal leptonic transport code to model pulsar wind nebulae. In this thesis
I present the development and implementation of this code that predicts the evolution of
the leptonic particle spectrum and radiation at different radii in a spherically-symmetric
source. I show how the code is calibrated using the models of previous authors and then
indicate how we simultaneously fit the overall broadband spectral energy distribution,
the surface brightness profile and the X-ray photon index vs. radius for PWN 3C 58,
PWN G21.5−0.9 and PWN G0.9+0.1. Such concurrent fitting of disparate data sets
is non-trivial and we thus investigate the utility of different goodness-of-fit statistics,
specifically the traditional χ 2 test statistic and a newly developed scaled-flux-normalised
test statistic to obtain best-fit parameters. We find reasonable fits to the spatial and
spectral data of all three sources, but note some remaining degeneracies that motivate
further model development and will have to be broken by future observations
Description
PhD (Space Physics), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2020