Effect of soft flares on XMM-Newton EPIC-pn timing mode data

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Abstract
The EPIC-pn CCD Camera on board the ESA X-ray observatory XMM-Newton is a very sensitive and versatile instrument with many observing modes. One of the modes, the timing mode, was designed so that a time resolution of 0.029 milliseconds can be achieved. This mode is important for observing bright variable sources with a very high time resolution. Up to now it has only been possible to use the spectra down to 300-400 eV in this mode. Below this energy the data appears to be affected by soft flares which are caused by stack overflows generated by high energy particles. We present a method that can be used to mitigate the effect these flares have on the data and discuss the improvement that this brings to the timing mode spectra. This new method will at last make it possible to get spectra down to the lowest energies detectable in this mode. This is particularly interesting for timing studies of isolated neutron stars and other variable objects, such as magnetic CVs, with very soft spectra.

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