We report on the Insight-HXMT observations of the new black hole X-ray binary MAXI J1820+070 during its 2018 outburst. Detailed spectral analysis via the continuum fitting method shows an evolution of the inferred spin during its high soft sate. Moreover, the hardness ratio, the non-thermal luminosity and the reflection fraction also undergo an evolution, exactly coincident to the period when the inferred spin transition takes place. The unphysical evolution of the spin is attributed to the evolution of the inner disc, which is caused by the collapse of a hot corona due to condensation mechanism or may be related to the deceleration of a jet-like corona. The studies of the inner disc radius and the relation between the disc luminosity and the inner disc radius suggest that, only at a particular epoch, did the inner edge of the disc reach the innermost stable circular orbit and the spin measurement is reliable. We then constrain the spin of MAXI J1820+070 to be $a_*=0.2^{+0.2}_{-0.3}$. Such a slowly spinning black hole possessing a strong jet suggests that its jet activity is driven mainly by the accretion disc rather than by the black hole spin.

This paper provides an investigation of the production/transport properties of W impurity in the edge of experimental advanced superconducting tokamak (EAST) H-mode discharges with upper-singlenull configurations by using DIVIMP Monte-Carlo code. The background plasmas are provided by SOLPS5.0 calculations. Firstly, to address the detailed dependence of W impurity behaviors on plasma conditions in the scraped-off layer (SOL)/divertor region of EAST, two pre-edge localized mode (ELM) cases with divertor plasmas in high-recycling and partially-detached regimes, respectively, are considered and compared. It is found that, due to the competitions between the thermal and friction forces (FFs), in the high-recycling case, large quantities of W impurities are transported to the upstream; while in the partially-detached case, most of the W impurities are located near the inner and outer divertors. Furthermore, the W core contamination in type-I ELMy H-mode plasmas of EAST has been estimated by the DIVIMP-SOLPS5.0 simulations, without the consideration of the release of W impurity from the core due to ELMs. During the ELM, simulations exhibit the low-recycling regime of divertor plasma, and high (several hundred eV) target plasma temperatures together with low SOL collisionality ( SOL * n ∼1-3), lead to an order of magnitude increase in the W core contamination rate. However, in the ELM-recovering phase, with the decrease (increase) of divertor plasma temperature (density), significant increase of divertor retention is obtained due to the remarkable increase of FFs on W ions. Besides, intra-ELM phase approximately contributes to more than 50% of the total W core contamination per an ELM cycle. This work represents a step toward a deeper understanding of the W impurity production/transport in EAST H-mode discharges.

We report on our analysis of the 2019 outburst of the X-ray accreting pulsar 4U 1901+03 observed with Insight-HXMT and NICER. Both spectra and pulse profiles evolve significantly in the decaying phase of the outburst. Dozens of flares are observed throughout the outburst. They are more frequent and brighter at the outburst peak. We find that the flares, which have a duration from tens to hundreds of seconds, are generally brighter than the persistent emission by a factor of ∼1.5. The pulse-profile shape during the flares can be significantly different from that of the persistent emission. In particular, a phase shift is clearly observed in many cases. We interpret these findings as direct evidence of changes of the pulsed beam pattern, due to transitions between the sub- and supercritical accretion regimes on a short time-scale. We also observe that at comparable luminosities the flares’ pulse profiles are rather similar to those of the persistent emission. This indicates that the accretion on the polar cap of the neutron star is mainly determined by the luminosity, i.e. the mass accretion rate.