Detectability of Magnetar-Induced Vacuum Birefringence with IXPE and eXTP
Abstract
We analyze the prospects of quantitatively detecting vacuum birefringence from magnetars using the IXPE and eXTP experiments. We adopt a realistic spatially-varying magnetic field profile for magnetars and use the one-loop refractive indices, without expanding in B/Bc, to calculate the differential time delay and accumulated phase between the two photon polarization eigenmodes. Including the extended magnetosphere enhances the time delay by a factor of 1.2--1.7 relative to a constant-field estimate and can yield delays approaching the microsecond scale for the strongest catalogued magnetar fields. We also study the evolution of the polarization state in a varying projected magnetic field using the Stokes-vector precession equation, derive the corresponding adiabaticity condition and polarization-limiting radius, and recover the fixed-eigenaxis expressions used in our catalog analysis as a controlled limit. We calculate the Stokes parameters for all known magnetars and investigate their observability with IXPE and eXTP, including the effects of instrumental response and energy averaging. We find that both experiments can be sensitive to magnetar vacuum birefringence under favorable conditions, with 1RXS J170849.0−400910 being the most promising candidates. A quantitative prediction for an individual magnetar, however, additionally requires a source-specific treatment of the emission mechanism, viewing geometry, plasma environment, and magnetospheric scattering, which we do not tackle in this study.
Related
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- Scattering and induced false vacuum decay in the two-dimensional quantum Ising model
- X-ray polarization of the Compton-thin Seyfert galaxy NGC 5506 with IXPE
BibTeX
@misc{abuajamieh2026detectability,
title = {{Detectability of Magnetar-Induced Vacuum Birefringence with IXPE and eXTP}},
author = {Fayez Abu-Ajamieh},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.02541},
eprint = {2605.02541},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02541},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Detectability of Magnetar-Induced Vacuum Birefringence with IXPE and eXTP
AU - Fayez Abu-Ajamieh
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.02541
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02541
AB - We analyze the prospects of quantitatively detecting vacuum birefringence from magnetars using the IXPE and eXTP experiments. We adopt a realistic spatially-varying magnetic field profile for magnetars and use the one-loop refractive indices, without expanding in B/B_c, to calculate the differential time delay and accumulated phase between the two photon polarization eigenmodes. Including the extended magnetosphere enhances the time delay by a factor of 1.2--1.7 relative to a constant-field estimate and can yield delays approaching the microsecond scale for the strongest catalogued magnetar fields. We also study the evolution of the polarization state in a varying projected magnetic field using the Stokes-vector precession equation, derive the corresponding adiabaticity condition and polarization-limiting radius, and recover the fixed-eigenaxis expressions used in our catalog analysis as a controlled limit. We calculate the Stokes parameters for all known magnetars and investigate their observability with IXPE and eXTP, including the effects of instrumental response and energy averaging. We find that both experiments can be sensitive to magnetar vacuum birefringence under favorable conditions, with 1RXS J170849.0−400910 being the most promising candidates. A quantitative prediction for an individual magnetar, however, additionally requires a source-specific treatment of the emission mechanism, viewing geometry, plasma environment, and magnetospheric scattering, which we do not tackle in this study.
ER -