Soft Gamma Repeaters and Anomalous X-ray Pulsars: Magnetar Candidates

Abstract

This article is a review of Soft Gamma Repeaters and Anomalous X-ray Pulsars. It contains a brief historical record of the emergence of these classes of neutron stars, a thorough overview of the observational data, a succinct summary of the magnetar model, and suggested directions for future research in this field.

51 pages, 15 figures, and 5 tables. To appear in "Compact Stellar X-ray Sources", eds. W.H.G. Lewin and M. van der Klis