The shape of the cutoff in the synchrotron emission of SN 1006 observed with XMM-Newton | Marco Miceli ( INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo)

Synchrotron X-ray emission from the rims of young supernova remnants allows us to study the high-energy tail of the electrons accelerated at the shock front. The analysis of X-ray spectra can provide information on the physical mechanisms that limit the energy achieved by the electrons in the acceleration process. We analzsed the deep observations of the XMM-Newton SN 1006 Large Program. We performed spatially resolved spectral analysis of a set of small regions in the nonthermal limbs and we modelled the X-ray spectra by adopting models that assume different shapes of the cutoff in the electron spectra. We found that radiative losses play a fundamental role in shaping the electron spectrum in SN 1006. In fact, a loss-limited model provides the best fit to all the spectra and this indicates that the shape of the cutoff in the electron momentum (p) distribution has the form exp[-(p/p_cut)^2]