A uniform search for thermonuclear burst oscillations in the RXTE legacy dataset

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We describe a blind uniform search for thermonuclear burst oscillations (TBOs) in the majority of Type-I bursts observed by RXTE (2118 bursts from 57 neutron stars).

• We examined 2-2002 Hz power spectra from the Fourier transform in sliding 0.5-2 s windows, using fine-binned light curves in 2-60 keV energy range.
• The significance of the oscillation candidates was assessed by simulations which took into account light curve variations, dead time and sliding time windows.
• Some of our sources exhibited multi-frequency variability below approximately 15 Hz that cannot be readily removed with light-curve modeling and may have an astrophysical (non-TBO) nature.