Antonino DʼAi (Universita di Palermo, Italy)

Using LOFT to determine the shape of cyclotron absorption features in HMXBs

Resonant absorption cyclotron features are a key diagnostic tool to directly measure the strength of the
magnetic field of accreting neutron stars. However, typical values for cyclotron features lie in the high-energy
part of the spectrum between 20 keV and 50 keV, where statistics is often damped by the low S/N ratio of the
spectra. I will consider the case of a recently detected cyclotron absorption feature in the high-mass X-ray
binary IGRJ16493-348 (D'Ai et al. 2011, A&A, 532, 173) using the Swift-BAT instrument and the possibility
offered by the large collecting area of LOFT at these energies to strongly determine the shape of these
important features.