The Influence of Evaporation on the Formation and Evolution of Huntsman Systems

Abstract

Huntsman systems are a recently identified and rare subclass of millisecond pulsar (MSP) binaries, characterized by a detached neutron star and an evolved giant companion in relatively wide orbits. Their formation has been proposed to involve red-bump-induced detachment, whereas the influence of MSP-driven evaporation during this evolutionary stage has not yet been quantitatively assessed. We quantify the influence of MSP-driven evaporation on the formation and evolution of Huntsman systems and assess its effects on their observable properties. We performed detailed binary evolution calculations including MSP-driven evaporation over a wide range of initial binary parameters and combined them with binary population synthesis to predict the observable population of Huntsman systems. We find that Huntsman systems originate primarily from binaries undergoing Case B mass transfer and red-bump-induced detachment, with initial donor masses of $1.0-2.5\ M_\odot$ and orbital periods above the bifurcation period. Evaporation has a secondary effect, slightly modifying the orbital evolution and the duration of the detached phase, but does not significantly alter the formation parameter space or the expected population, which contains about 10 Huntsman systems. We further show that evaporation can produce systematic shifts in the white dwarf mass-orbital period relation at the low-mass end, leading to systematically wider final orbits for a given white dwarf mass.