Out of the frying pan: a young pulsar with a long radio trail emerging from SNR G315.9-0.0

The faint radio supernova remnant SNR G315.9-0.0 is notable for a long and thin trail that extends outward perpendicular from the edge of its approximately circular shell. In a search with the Parkes telescope we have found a young and energetic pulsar that is located at the tip of this collimated linear structure. PSR J1437-5959 has period P = 61 ms, characteristic age tau_c = 114 kyr, and spin-down luminosity dE/dt = 1.4e36 erg/s. It is very faint, with a flux density at 1.4 GHz of about 75 uJy. From its dispersion measure of 549 pc/cc, we infer d ~ 8 kpc. At this distance and for an age comparable to tau_c, the implied pulsar velocity in the plane of the sky is V_t = 300 km/s for a birth at the center of the SNR, although it is possible that the SNR/pulsar system is younger than tau_c and that V_t > 300 km/s. The highly collimated linear feature is evidently the pulsar wind trail left from the supersonic passage of PSR J1437-5959 through the interstellar medium surrounding SNR G315.9-0.0.Comment: accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

Radio spectrum of the AXP J1810-197 and of its profile components

As part of a European Pulsar Network (EPN) multi-telescope observing campaign, we performed simultaneous multi-frequency observations at 1.4, 4.9 and 8.4 GHz during July 2006 and quasi-simultaneous multi-frequency observations from Decem- ber 2006 until July 2007 at 2.7, 4.9, 8.4, 14.6 and 32 GHz, in order to obtain flux density measurements and spectral features of the 5.5-sec radio-emitting magnetar AXP J1810-197. We monitored the spectral evolution of its pulse shape which consists of a main pulse (MP) and an interpulse (IP). We present the flux density spectrum of the average profile and of the separate pulse components of this first-known radio-emitting transient anomalous X-ray pulsar. We observe a decrease of the flux density by a factor of 10 within 8 months and follow the disappearance of one of the two main components. Although the spectrum is generally flat, we observe large fluctuations of the spectral index with time. For that reason we have made some measurements of modulation indices for individual pulses in order to also investigate the origin of these fluctuations.Comment: accepted for publication in MNRAS, 9 pages, 7 figures, 5 table

Rewriting Modulo SMT and Open System Analysis

Rewriting modulo SMT is a new technique that combines the power of SMT solving, rewriting modulo theories, and model checking. Rewriting modulo SMT is ideally suited to model and analyze reachability properties of infinite-state open systems, i.e., systems that interact with a nondeterministic environment. Such systems exhibit both internal nondeterminism, which is proper to the system, and external nondeterminism, which is due to the environment. In a reflective formalism, such as rewriting logic, rewriting modulo SMT can be reduced to standard rewriting. Hence, rewriting modulo SMT naturally extends rewriting-based reachability analysis techniques, which are available for closed systems, to open systems. In this talk, I will be discussing the main conceptual and technical ideas behind rewriting modulo SMT, its state of implementation in the Maude system, and some research challenges to be tackled during the next few years.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Expanding plasmas from Anti de Sitter black holes

We introduce a new foliation of AdS$_5$ black holes such that the conformal boundary takes the form of a $4$-dimensional FLRW spacetime with scale factor $a(t)$. The foliation employs Eddington-Finkelstein-like coordinates and is applicable to a large class of AdS black holes, supported by matter fields or not, considerably extending previous efforts in the literature. We argue that the holographic dual picture of a CFT plasma on a FLRW background provides an interesting prototype to study the nonequilibrium dynamics of expanding plasmas and use holographic renormalization to extract the renormalized energy-momentum tensor of the dual plasma. We illustrate the procedure for three black holes of interest, namely AdS-Schwarzschild, AdS-Gauss-Bonnet, and AdS-Reissner-Nordstr\"om. For the latter, as a by-product, we show that the nonequilibrium dynamics of a CFT plasma subject to a quench in the chemical potential (i.e., a time-dependent chemical potential) resembles a cosmological evolution with the scale factor $a(t)$ being inversely related to the quench profile.Comment: 16 pages, no figures; V2: references updated; V3: version to appear in EPJ