Letter to the Editor

Lepton models for TeV emission from SNR RX J1713.7-3946

Z. H. Fan¹, S. M. Liu², Q. Yuan³ and L. Fletcher²

¹ Department of Physics, Yunnan University, Kunming 650091, Yunnan, PR China e-mail: fanzh@ynu.edu.cn
² Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK e-mail: sliu@astro.gla.ac.uk
³ Key Laboratory of Particle Astrophysics, Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, PR China

Received: 8 June 2010
Accepted: 4 July 2010

Abstract

Aims. SNR RX J1713.7-3946 is perhaps one of the best observed shell-type supernova remnants with emissions dominated by energetic particles accelerated near the shock front. The nature of the TeV emission, however, is an issue still open to investigation.

Methods. We carried out a systematic study of four lepton models for the TeV emission with the Markov chain Monte Carlo method.

Results. It is shown that current data already give good constraints on the model parameters. Two commonly used parametric models do not appear to fit the observed radio, X-ray, and γ-ray spectra. Models motivated by diffusive shock acceleration and by stochastic acceleration by compressive waves in the shock downstream give comparably good fits. The former has a sharper spectral cutoff in the hard X-ray band than the latter. Future observations with the HXMT and NuSTAR may distinguish these two models.