A new representation of the light curve and its power density spectrum

Abstract

We present a new representation of light curves, which is quite different from the binning method. Instead of choosing uniform bins, the reciprocal of interval between two successive photons is adopted to represent the counting rate. A primary application of this light curve is to compute the power density spectrum by means of Lomb Periodogram and to find possible periods. To verify this new representation, we apply this method to artificial periodic data and some known periodic celestial objects, and the periods are all correctly found. Compared with the traditional fast Fourier transform method, our method does not rely on the bin size and has a spontaneously high time resolution, guaranteeing a wide frequency range in power density spectrum, and is especially useful when the photons are rare for its little information losses. Some other applications of the new light curve, like pulse identification, variability and spectral time lag, are also discussed.