Detection of anti-correlated hard X-ray time lag in Cygnus X-3

The wide-band X-ray spectra of the high mass X-ray binary Cygnus X-3 exhibits a pivoting behavior in the `low' (as well as `hard') state, correlated to the radio emission. The time scale of the soft and hard X-rays' anti-correlation, which gave rise to the pivoting feature, was found to be less than a day from the monitoring observations by RXTE--ASM and CGRO--BATSE. In this Letter we report the detection of a lag of $\lesssim$ 1000s in the anti-correlation of the hard X-ray emission (20--50 keV) to that of the soft X-ray emission (2--7 keV), which may be attributed to the viscous time scale of flow of matter in the accretion disk. This suggests the geometrical picture of a truncated accretion disc with a Compton cloud inside the disc, the relative sizes of which determine the spectral shape. Any change in the disc structure will take place in a viscous time scale, with corresponding anti-correlated change in the Compton cloud. We also report the pivoting in the spectra in one span of a pointed observation when an episode of the rearranging of the accretion system is serendipitously observed. This is the first such observation of hard X-ray delay seen in the persistent Galactic microquasars, within the precincts of the hard state.Comment: Accepted in The Astrophysical Journal (Letters): in pres

The multi-frequency angular power spectrum of the epoch of reionization 21 cm signal

Observations of redshifted 21cm radiation from HI at high redshifts is an important future probe of reionization. We consider the Multi-frequency Angular Power Spectrum (MAPS) to quantify the statistics of the HI signal as a joint function of the angular multipole l and frequency separation \Delta\nu. The signal at two different frequencies is expected to get decorrelated as \Delta\nu is increased, and quantifying this decorrelation is particularly important in deciding the frequency resolution for future HI observations. This is also expected to play a very crucial role in extracting the signal from foregrounds as the signal is expected to decorrelate much faster than the foregrounds (which are largely continuum sources) with increasing \Delta\nu. In this paper we develop formulae relating the MAPS to different components of the three dimensional HI power spectrum taking into account HI peculiar velocities. We show that the flat-sky approximation provides a very good representation over the angular scales of interest, and a final expression which is very simple to calculate and interpret. We present results considering two models for the HI distribution, namely, (i) DM: where the HI traces the dark matter and (ii) PR: where the effects of patchy reionization are incorporated through two parameters. We find that while the DM signal is largely featureless, the PR signal peaks at the angular scales of the individual bubbles, and the signal is considerably enhanced for large bubble size. For most cases of interest at l \sim 100 the signal is uncorrelated beyond \Delta\nu \sim 1 MHz or even less, whereas it occurs around \sim 0.1 MHz at l \sim 10^3. The \Delta\nu dependence also carries an imprint of the bubble size and the bias, and is expected to be an important probe of the reionization scenario (abridged).Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Revised to match the accepted versio