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Description
Supergiant Fast X-ray Transients (SFXTs) are High Mass X-ray Binaries (HMXBs) that are defined by their hard X-ray flaring behaviour. During such flares they reach peak luminosities of 10^36^-10^37^erg/s for a few hours (in the hard X-ray): much shorter timescales than those characterizing Be/X-ray binaries. We investigate the characteristics of bright flares (detections in excess of 5{sigma}) for a sample of SFXTs and their relation to the orbital phase. We have retrieved all Swift/BAT Transient Monitor light curves, and collected all detections in excess of 5{sigma} from both daily- and orbital-averaged light curves in the time range 2005 February 12 to 2013 May 31 (MJD 53413-56443). We also considered all on-board detections as recorded in the same time span and selected those within 4 arcmin of each source in our sample and in excess of 5{sigma}. We present a catalogue of over a thousand BAT flares from 11 SFXTs, down to 15-150keV fluxes of ~6x10^-10^erg/cm^2^/s (daily timescale) and ~1.5x10^-9^erg/cm^2^/s (orbital timescale, averaging ~800s) and spanning 100 months. The great majority of these flares are unpublished. This population is characterized by short (a few hundred seconds) and relatively bright (in excess of 100mCrab, 15-50keV) events. In the hard X-ray, these flares last in general much less than a day. Clustering of hard X-ray flares can be used to indirectly measure the length of an outburst, even when the low-level emission is not detected. We construct the distributions of flares, of their significance (in terms of sigma) and their flux as a function of orbital phase, to infer the properties of these binary systems. In particular, we observe a trend of clustering of flares at some phases as P_orb increases, as consistent with a progression from tight, circular or mildly eccentric orbits at short periods, to wider and more eccentric orbits at longer orbital periods. Finally, we estimate the expected number of flares for a given source for our limiting flux and provide the recipe for calculating them for the limiting flux of future hard X-ray observatories.
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