The hard X-ray synchrotron emission from pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) probes energetic particles, closely related to the pulsar injection power at the present time. INTEGRAL has disclosed the yet poorly known population of hard X-ray pulsar/PWN systems. We summarize the properties of the class, with emphasys on the first hard X-ray bow-shock (CTB 80 powered by PSR B1951+32), and highlight some prospects for the study of Pulsar Wind Nebulae with the Simbol-X mission.
We present first results of three dimensional relativistic magnetohydrodynamical simulations of Pulsar Wind Nebulae. They show that the kink instability and magnetic dissipation inside these nebulae may be the key processes allowing to reconcile their observations with the theory of pulsar winds. In particular, the size of the termination shock, obtained in the simulations, agrees very well with the observations even for Poynting-dominated pulsar winds. Due to magnetic dissipation the total pressure in the simulated nebulae is particle-dominated and more or less uniform. While in the main body…
We review multiwavelength properties of pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) created by supersonically moving pulsars and the effects of pulsar motion on the PWN morphologies and the ambient medium. Supersonic pulsar wind nebulae (SPWNe) are characterized by bow-shaped shocks around the pulsar and/or cometary tails filled with the shocked pulsar wind. In the past several years significant advances in SPWN studies have been made in deep observations with the Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray Observatories as well as the Hubble Space Telescope. In particular, these observations have revealed very diverse SPWN …
The number of plausible associations of extended VHE (TeV) sources with pulsars has been steadily growing, suggesting that many of these sources are pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe). Here we overview the recent progress in X-ray and TeV observations of PWNe and summarize their properties.
The role pulsar wind nebulae play in producing our locally observed cosmic ray spectrum remains murky, yet intriguing. Pulsar wind nebulae are born and evolve in conjunction with SNRs, which are favored sites of Galactic cosmic ray acceleration. As a result they frequently complicate interpretation of the gamma-ray emission seen from SNRs. However, pulsar wind nebulae may also contribute directly to the local cosmic ray spectrum, particularly the leptonic component. This paper reviews the current thinking on pulsar wind nebulae and their connection to cosmic ray production from an observationa…
The morphology of young Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWN) is largely determined by the properties of the wind injected by the pulsar. We have used a recent parametrization of the wind obtained from Force Free Electrodynamics simulations of pulsar magnetospheres to simulate nebulae for different sets of pulsar parameters. We performed axisymmetric Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics simulations to test the morphology dependence of the nebula on the obliquity of the pulsar and on the magnetization of the pulsar wind. We compare these simulations to the morphology of the Vela and Crab PWN. We find that the…
Bow-shock pulsar wind nebulae are a subset of pulsar wind nebulae that form when the pulsar has high velocity due to the natal kick during the supernova explosion. The interaction between the relativistic wind from the fast-moving pulsar and the interstellar medium produces a bow-shock and a trail, which are detectable in H$_α$ emission. Among such bow-shock pulsar wind nebulae, the Guitar Nebula stands out for its peculiar morphology, which consists of a prominent bow-shock head and a series of bubbles further behind. We present a scenario in which multiple bubbles can be produced when the pu…
The extended nebulae formed as pulsar winds expand into their surroundings provide information about the composition of the winds, the injection history from the host pulsar, and the material into which the nebulae are expanding. Observations from across the electromagnetic spectrum provide constraints on the evolution of the nebulae, the density and composition of the surrounding ejecta, the geometry of the central engines, and the long-term fate of the energetic particles produced in these systems. Such observations reveal the presence of jets and wind termination shocks, time-varying compac…
In this review we describe recent observational and theoretical developments in our understanding of pulsar winds and pulsar-wind nebulae (PWNe). We put special emphasis on the results from observations of well-characterized PWNe of various types (e.g., torus-jet and bowshock-tail), the most recent MHD modeling efforts, and the status of the flaring Crab PWN puzzle.
A spatially-independent model that can be used to calculate the temporal evolution of the electron/ positron spectrum in a spherically expanding pulsar wind nebula is presented. The model is applied to the young nebula G21.5-0.9, as well as to the unidentified TeV sources HESS J1427-608 and HESS J1507-622. The parameters derived from the model strengthens the idea that the unidentified sources can be identified as evolved pulsar wind nebulae.
I review the current status of our theoretical understanding of Pulsar Winds and associated nebulae (PWNe). In recent years, axisymmetric models of pulsar winds with a latitude dependent energy flux have proved very successful at explaining the morphology of PWNe as seen in the X-rays. This success has prompted developments aimed at using multi-wavelength observations of these nebulae as a diagnostics of the hidden physics of the pulsar wind and of the mechanism(s) through which particles are accelerated in these sources. I will discuss these most recent developments in terms of the informatio…
Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNe) represent the most numerous population of TeV sources in our Galaxy. These sources, some of which emit very-high-energy (VHE) gamma-rays, are believed to be related to the young and energetic pulsars that power highly magnetized nebulae (a few $μ$G to a few hundred $μ$G). In this scenario, particles are accelerated to VHE along their expansion into the pulsar surroundings, or at the shocks produced in collisions of the winds with the surrounding medium. Those energetic pulsars can be traced using observations with the Fermi-LAT detector. The MAGIC Collaboration has c…
The extended nebulae formed as pulsar winds expand into their surroundings provide information about the composition of the winds, the injection history from the host pulsar, and the material into which the nebulae are expanding. Observations from across the electromagnetic spectrum provide constraints on the evolution of the nebulae, the density and composition of the surrounding ejecta, the geometry of the central engines, and the long-term fate of the energetic particles produced in these systems. Such observations reveal the presence of jets and wind termination shocks, time-varying compac…
We numerically study the radiative properties of the reverberation phase of pulsar wind nebulae. Reverberation brings a significant evolution in a short period of time. We show that even the Crab nebula, associated to the more energetic pulsar of the sample we consider, has a period in its future time evolution where the X-ray luminosity will exceed the spin-down power at the time. In fact, all nebulae in our sample are expected to have a period of radio, X-ray, and GeV superefficiency, and most will also have a period of TeV superefficiency. We analyze and characterize these superefficient ph…
We investigate a class of pulsar wind nebulae that show synchrotron emission from a thick toroidal structure. The best studied such object is the small radio and X-ray nebula around the Vela pulsar, which can be interpreted as the result of interaction of a mildly supersonic inward flow with the recent pulsar wind. Such a flow near the center of a supernova remnant can be produced in a transient phase when the reverse shock reaches the center of the remnant. Other nebulae with a thick toroidal structure are G106.6+2.9 and G76.9+1.0. Their structure contrasts with young pulsar nebulae like the …
To look for possible phenomenological connections between pulsar's timing properties and emissions from pulsar wind nebulae and their pulsars, we studied the power-law component of the X-ray emissions from 35 pulsar wind nebulae which have a detected pulsar in X-rays. Our major results are in the following: (1) The power-law component of the X-ray luminosities, in the energy range from 0.5 keV to 8 keV, of the nebulae and of the pulsar both show a strong correlation with the pulsar spin-down power ($\dot{E}$), consistent with earlier studies. However, equally significant correlations with the …
We review properties of Galactic VHE sources detected at TeV energies. The number of associations between the VHE sources and pulsars has grown in recent years, making pulsar-wind nebulae the dominant population, although there is still a substantial number of VHE sources which remain to be identified. Among the latter there are several "dark" sources which do not have plausible counterparts at any other wavelengths. In this review we compile and compare the TeV and X-ray properties of pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe), PWN candidates, and unidentified TeV sources.
Pulsars are known to be efficient accelerators that produce copious amounts of relativistic particles and inject them into the Galactic medium. The radiation emitted by such a pulsar wind can be seen from radio through gamma-rays as a pulsar-wind nebula (PWN). Here we overview and summarize recent progress in X-ray and TeV observations of PWNe.
Identification and characterization of a rapidly increasing number of pulsar wind nebulae is, and will continue to be, a challenge of high-energy gamma-ray astrophysics. Given that such systems constitute -- by far -- the most numerous expected population in the TeV regime, such characterization is important not only to learn about the sources per se from an individual and population perspective, but also to be able to connect them with observations at other frequencies, especially in radio and X-rays. Also, we need to remove the emission from nebulae in highly confused regions of the sky for …
Recently, gamma-ray emission at TeV energies has been detected from the starburst galaxies NGC253 (Acero et al., 2009) and M82 (Acciari et al., 2009. It has been claimed that pion production due to cosmic rays accelerated in supernova remnants interacting with the interstellar gas is responsible for the observed gamma rays. Here, we show that the gamma-ray pulsar wind nebulae left behind by the supernovae contribute to the TeV luminosity in a major way. A single pulsar wind nebula produces about ten times the total luminosity of the Sun at energies above 1 TeV during a lifetime of 10^5 years. …
We investigate the dynamics of bow shock nebulae created by pulsars moving supersonically through a partially ionized interstellar medium. A fraction of interstellar neutral hydrogen atoms penetrating into the tail region of a pulsar wind will undergo photo-ionization due to the UV light emitted by the nebula, with the resulting mass loading dramatically changing the flow dynamics of the light leptonic pulsar wind. Using a quasi 1-D hydrodynamic model of relativistic flow we find that if a relatively small density of neutral hydrogen, as low as $10^{-4}$ cm$^{-3}$, penetrate inside the pulsar …
We investigate the dynamics of bow shock nebulae created by pulsars moving supersonically through a partially ionized interstellar medium. A fraction of interstellar neutral hydrogen atoms penetrating into the tail region of a pulsar wind will undergo photo-ionization due to the UV light emitted by the nebula, with the resulting mass loading dramatically changing the flow dynamics of the light leptonic pulsar wind. Using a quasi 1-D hydrodynamic model of both non-relativistic and relativistic flow, and focusing on scales much larger than the stand-off distance, we find that if a relatively sma…
The evolution of the non-thermal emission emitted by pulsar wind nebulae is generally calculated using spatially-independent particle transport models. Although useful, these models implicitly assume that the source of non-thermal particles is located uniformly throughout the system, contrary to the nature of pulsar wind nebulae where the source is located at the centre of the system. Additionally, it is not possible to take into account the spatial properties of the magnetic field and flow velocity, or the effects of diffusion and gradient and curvature drifts in these models. In this paper w…
Pulsar Wind Nebulae are highly intriguing astrophysical objects in many respects. They are the brightest and closest class of relativistic sources, and hence the ultimate laboratory for the physics of relativistic plasmas: several processes observed (or inferred to occur) in other classes of relativistic sources can here be studied with unique detail, like the acceleration and collimation of relativistic outflows, or the acceleration of particles at relativistic shocks. Here I review the current status of our theoretical understanding of Pulsar Wind Nebulae in light of the most recent 2D and 3…
We discuss the observational properties of pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) linking them to the injected (at the termination shock) electron spectral energy distribution and parameters of pulsar magnetospheres. In particular, we (1) present spatially-resolved Chandra ACIS spectral maps of twelve PWNe and measure the slopes of the uncooled PWN spectra just downstream of the termination shock obtained from these maps, (2) consider the connections between PWN morphologies and predictions of the magnetospheric emission models and (3) discuss the limits on the maximum energies of particles in PWNe from X…
Pulsar wind nebulae are fascinating systems, and archetypal sources for high-energy astrophysics in general. Due to their vicinity, brightness, to the fact that they shine at multi-wavelengths, and especially to their long-living emission at gamma-rays, modelling their properties is particularly important for the correct interpretation of the visible Galaxy. A complication in this respect is the variety of properties and morphologies they show at different ages. Here we discuss the differences among the evolutionary phases of pulsar wind nebulae, how they have been modeled in the past and what…
Nearby electron/positron accelerators, mostly Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNe), have been proposed as potential origins of the positron excess above 10 GeV. The HAWC Observatory reveals two very extended sources spatially coincident with two nearby middle-aged pulsars: Geminga and PSR B0656+14, suggesting ultrarelativistic electrons/positrons accelerated in our backyard. Morphological studies on these two PWNe provide a constraint on the diffusion coefficient at HAWC energies. In this poster, we will present the model development and morphological studies on these PWNe, and the derived diffusion coe…
Neutron stars lose the bulk of their rotational energy in the form of a pulsar wind: an ultra-relativistic outflow of predominantly electrons and positrons. This pulsar wind significantly impacts the environment and possible binary companion of the neutron star, and studying the resultant pulsar wind nebulae is critical for understanding the formation of neutron stars and millisecond pulsars, the physics of the neutron star magnetosphere, the acceleration of leptons up to PeV energies, and how these particles impact the interstellar medium. With the SKA1 and the SKA2, it could be possible to s…
Bow Shock Pulsar Wind Nebulae are a class of non-thermal sources, that form when the wind of a pulsar moving at supersonic speed interacts with the ambient medium, either the ISM or in a few cases the cold ejecta of the parent supernova. These systems have attracted attention in recent years, because they allow us to investigate the properties of the pulsar wind in a different environment from that of canonical Pulsar Wind Nebulae in Supernova Remnants. However, due to the complexity of the interaction, a full-fledged multidimensional analysis is still laking. We present here a simplified appr…
To investigate the nature and evolution of TeV pulsar wind nebulae, we examine the firmly identified PWNe in the H.E.S.S. Galactic Plane Survey, along with the few other known detections from the literature, as well as the upper limits extracted from the H.E.S.S survey. These data exhibit a correlation of TeV surface brightness with pulsar spin-down power. It appears to be caused by both an increase of TeV extension and a decrease of TeV luminosity with decreasing spin-down power. We also find that the offsets of pulsars with ages around 10 kyr with respect to the wind nebula centres are frequ…
In the last decade, the relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modelling of pulsar wind nebulae, and of the Crab nebula in particular, has been highly successful, with many of the observed dynamical and emission properties reproduced down to the finest detail. Here, we critically discuss the results of some of the most recent studies: namely the investigation of the origin of the radio emitting particles and the quest for the acceleration sites of particles of different energies along the termination shock, by using wisps motion as a diagnostic tool; the study of the magnetic dissipation proce…
The high sensitivity of the Fermi-LAT (Large Area Telescope) offers the first opportunity to study faint and extended GeV sources such as pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe). After one year of observation the LAT detected and identified three pulsar wind nebulae: the Crab Nebula, Vela-X and the PWN inside MSH 15-52. In the meantime, the list of LAT detected pulsars increased steadily. These pulsars are characterized by high energy loss rates from ~3 \times 10^{33} erg s$^{-1}$ to 5 \times 10$^{38}$ erg s$^{-1}$ and are therefore likely to power a PWN. This paper summarizes the search for PWNe in the of…
Bow shock pulsar wind nebulae are a large class of non-thermal synchrotron sources associated to old pulsars, that have emerged from their parent supernova remnant and are directly interacting with the interstellar medium. Within this class a few objects show extended X-ray features, generally referred as "jets", that defies all the expectations from the canonical MHD models, being strongly misaligned respect to the pulsar direction of motion. It has been suggested that these jets might originate from high energy particles that escape from the system. Here we investigate this possibility, comp…
Pulsars out of their parent SNR directly interact with the ISM producing so called Bow-Shock Pulsar Wind Nebulae, the relativistic equivalents of the heliosphere/heliotail system. These have been directly observed from Radio to X-ray, and are found also associated to TeV halos, with a large variety of morphologies. They offer a unique environment where the pulsar wind can be studied by modelling its interaction with the surrounding ambient medium, in a fashion that is different/complementary from the canonical Plerions. These systems have also been suggested as the possible origin of the posit…
Pulsar Wind Nebulae, and the Crab nebula in particular, are the best cosmic laboratories to investigate the dynamics of magnetized relativistic outflows and particle acceleration up to PeV energies. Multidimensional MHD modeling by means of numerical simulations has been very successful at reproducing, to the very finest details, the innermost structure of these synchrotron emitting nebulae, as observed in the X-rays. Therefore, the comparison between the simulated source and observations can be used as a powerful diagnostic tool to probe the physical conditions in pulsar winds, like their com…
The most numerous source class that emerged from the H.E.S.S. Galactic Plane Survey are Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNe). The 2013 reanalysis of this survey, undertaken after almost 10 years of observations, provides us with the most sensitive and most complete census of gamma-ray PWNe to date. In addition to a uniform analysis of spectral and morphological parameters, for the first time also flux upper limits for energetic young pulsars were extracted from the data. We present a discussion of the correlation between energetic pulsars and TeV objects, and their respective properties. We will put the…
Pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) are main gamma-ray emitters in the Galactic plane. Although the leptonic scenario is able to explain most PWNe emission well, a hadronic contribution cannot be excluded. High-energy emission raises the possibility that gamma-rays are hadronically produced which inevitably leads to the production of neutrinos. We report a stacking analysis to search for neutrino emission from 35 PWNe that are very-high-energy gamma-ray emitters and the results using 9.5 years of all-sky IceCube data. In the absence of any significant correlation, we set upper limits on the total neutr…
Several Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNe) have been detected in the TeV band in the last decade.The TeV emission is typically interpreted in a purely leptonic scenario, but this usually requires that the magnetic field in the Nebula be much lower than the equipartition value and the assumption of an enhanced target radiation at IR frequencies. In this work we consider the possibility that, in addition to the relativistic electrons, also relativistic hadrons are present in these nebulae. Assuming that part of the emitted TeV photons are of hadronic origin, we compute the associated flux of $\sim 1-100…
The HAWC Gamma-Ray Observatory has reported the discovery of TeV gamma-ray emission extending several degrees around the positions of Geminga and B0656+14 pulsars. Assuming these gamma rays are produced by inverse Compton scattering off low-energy photons in electron halos around the pulsars, we determine the diffusion of electrons and positrons in the local interstellar medium. We will present the morphological and spectral studies of these two VHE gamma-ray sources and the derived positron spectrum at Earth.
When a pulsar is moving through a partially ionized medium, a fraction of neutral Hydrogen atoms penetrate inside the pulsar wind and can be photo-ionized by the nebula UV radiation. The resulting protons remains attached to the magnetic field of the light leptonic pulsar wind enhancing its inertia and changing the flow dynamics of the wind. We present here the first numerical simulations of such effect in the tails of bow shock nebulae. We produce a set of different models representative of pulsars moving in the interstellar medium with different velocities, from highly subsonic to supersonic…
We propose that cosmic-ray PeVatrons are pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) inside supernova remnants (SNRs). The PWN initially expands into the freely expanding stellar ejecta. Then, the PWN catches up with the shocked region of the SNR, where particles can be slightly accelerated by the back and forth motion between the PWN and the SNR, and some particles diffuse into the PWN. Afterwards the PWN is compressed by the SNR, where the particles in the PWN are accelerated by the adiabatic compression. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, we show that particles accelerated by the SNR to 0.1 PeV can be reaccele…
Recent observations by the PAMELA and AMS-02 telescopes have uncovered an anomalous rise in the positron fraction at energies above 10~GeV. One possible explanation for this excess is the production of primary electron/positron pairs through electromagnetic cascades in pulsar magnetospheres. This process results in a high multiplicity of electron/positron pairs within the wind-termination shock of pulsar wind nebula (PWN). A consequence of this scenario is that no circular polarization should be observed within PWN, since the contributions from electrons and positrons exactly cancel. Here we n…
We review observations of several classes of neutron-star-powered outflows: pulsar-wind nebulae (PWNe) inside shell supernova remnants (SNRs), PWNe interacting directly with interstellar medium (ISM), and magnetar-powered outflows. We describe radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray observations of PWNe, focusing first on integrated spectral-energy distributions (SEDs) and global spectral properties. High-resolution X-ray imaging of PWNe shows a bewildering array of morphologies, with jets, trails, and other structures. Several of the 23 so far identified magnetars show evidence for continuous or sporadic…
Young pulsars and the pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) or supernova remnants (SNRs) that surround them are some of the most dynamic and high-powered environments in our Universe. With the rise of more sensitive observations, the number of pulsar-SNR and PWN associations (hereafter, SNR/PWN) has increased, yet we do not understand to which extent this environment influences the pulsars' impulsive radio signals. We studied the dispersive contribution of SNRs and PWNe on Galactic pulsars, and considered their relevance to fast radio bursts (FRBs) such as FRB 121102. We investigated the dispersion measu…
The detection of bright X-ray features and large TeV halos around old pulsars that have escaped their parent Supernova Remnants and are interacting directly with the ISM, suggest that high energy particles, more likely high energy pairs, can escape from these systems, and that this escape if far more complex than a simple diffusive model can predict. Here we present for the first time a detailed analysis of how high energy particles escape from the head of the bow shock. In particular we focus our attention on the role of the magnetic field geometry, and the inclination of the pulsar spin axis…
Bow shock pulsar wind nebulae are observed with a variety of complex morphologies at different wavelengths, most likely due to differences in the magnetic field strength and pulsar wind geometry. Here we present a detailed analysis, showing how these differences affect the observational properties in these systems, focusing on non-thermal synchrotron emission. By adopting different prescriptions for the local emissivity, on top of the magnetic and flow patterns taken from 3D high-resolution numerical simulations in relativistic MHD, and considering various viewing angles, we try to characteriz…
In this paper, we propose a new scenario in which a rapidly-rotating strongly-magnetized pulsar without any surrounding supernova ejecta produces fast radio bursts (FRBs) repeatedly via some mechanisms, and meanwhile, an ultra-relativistic electron/positron pair wind from the pulsar sweeps up its ambient dense interstellar medium, giving rise to a non-relativistic pulsar wind nebula (PWN). We show that the synchrotron radio emission from such a PWN is bright enough to account for the recently-discovered persistent radio source associated with the repeating FRB 121102 in reasonable ranges of th…
We have carried out a detailed study of the spectral nature of six pulsars surrounded by Pulsar wind nebulae (PWN). The pulsar flux density were estimated using the interferometric imaging technique of the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope at three frequencies 325 MHz, 610 MHz and 1280 MHz. The spectra showed a turnover around gigahertz frequency in four out of six pulsars. It has been suggested that the gigahertz peaked spectra (GPS) in pulsars arises due to thermal absorption of the pulsar emission in surrounding medium like PWN, HII regions, Supernova remnants, etc. The relatively high incide…
Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNe) are bubbles or relativistic plasma that form when the pulsar wind is confined by the SNR or the ISM. Recent observations have shown a richness of emission features that has driven a renewed interest in the theoretical modeling of these objects. In recent years a MHD paradigm has been developed, capable of reproducing almost all of the observed properties of PWNe, shedding new light on many old issues. Given that PWNe are perhaps the nearest systems where processes related to relativistic dynamics can be investigated with high accuracy, a reliable model of their behav…
The increasing sensitivity of instruments at X-ray and TeV energies have revealed a large number of nebulae associated with bright pulsars. Despite this large data set, the observed pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) do not show a uniform behavior and the main parameters driving features like luminosity, magnetization, and others are still not fully understood. To evaluate the possible existence of common evolutive trends and to link the characteristics of the nebula emission with those of the powering pulsar, we selected a sub-set of 10 TeV detections which are likely ascribed to young PWNe and model…
During the search for counterparts of very-high-energy gamma-ray sources, we serendipitously discovered large, extended, low surface brightness emission from PWNe around pulsars with the ages up to ~100 kyrs, a discovery made possible by the low and stable background of the Suzaku X-ray satellite. A systematic study of a sample of 8 of these PWNe, together with Chandra datasets, has revealed us that the nebulae keep expanding up to for ~100 kyrs, although time scale of the synchrotron X-ray emission is only ~60 yr for typical magnetic fields of 100 microG. Our result suggests that the accelera…
Bow-shock pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) show a variety of morphological shapes. We attribute this diversity to the geometrical factors: relative orientations of the pulsar rotation axis, proper velocity, and the line of sight (magnetic inclination angle may also have a certain influence on the morphology). We identify three basic types of bow-shock nebulae: (i) a "Rifle Bullet" (pulsar spin axis and proper velocity are aligned); (ii) a "Frisbee" (pulsar spin axis and proper velocity are orthogonal with the spin axis lying in the plane of the sky), and (iii) a Cart Wheel" (like frisbee but the spi…
The majority of Galactic TeV gamma-ray sources are pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) and supernova remnants (SNRs), and the most common association for unidentified sources is PWN. Many of these sources were discovered in TeV by imaging air Cherenkov telescopes using overlapping pointed observations over sections of the Galactic plane. The HAWC observatory is a survey type instrument in the Northern hemisphere with an energy range of 100 GeV to 100 TeV. Preliminary analysis of data recorded with the partially completed HAWC array taken since 2013 shows extended detections that are coincident with kno…
A possible way to calculate particle spectra as a function of position in pulsar wind nebulae is to solve a Fokker-Planck transport equation. This paper presents numerical solutions to the transport equation with the processes of convection, diffusion, adiabatic losses, and synchrotron radiation included. In the first part of the paper the steady-state version of the transport equation is solved as a function of position and energy. This is done to distinguish the various effects of the aforementioned processes on the solutions to the transport equation. The second part of the paper deals with…
The model for pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) as the result of the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) downstream flow from a shocked, relativistic pulsar wind has been successful in reproducing many features of the nebulae observed close to the central pulsars. However, observations of well-studied young nebulae like the Crab Nebula, 3C 58, and G21.5--0.9 do not show the toroidal magnetic field on a larger scale that might be expected in the MHD flow model; in addition, the radial variation of spectral index due to synchrotron losses is smoother than expected in the MHD flow model. We find that pure diffusi…
The study of supernova remnants and pulsar wind nebulae was one of the Key Science Projects for the first two years of VERITAS observations. VERITAS is an array of four imaging Cherenkov telescopes located at the Whipple Observatory in southern Arizona. Supernova remnants are widely considered to be the strongest candidate for the source of cosmic rays below the knee at around 10^15 eV. Pulsar wind nebulae are synchrotron nebulae powered by the spin-down of energetic young pulsars, and comprise one of the most populous very-high-energy gamma-ray source classes. This poster will summarize the r…
