The population point of view on the evolution of TeV pulsar wind nebulae
Résumé
To investigate the nature and evolution of TeV pulsar wind nebulae, we examine the firmly identified PWNe in the H.E.S.S. Galactic Plane Survey, along with the few other known detections from the literature, as well as the upper limits extracted from the H.E.S.S survey. These data exhibit a correlation of TeV surface brightness with pulsar spin-down power. It appears to be caused by both an increase of TeV extension and a decrease of TeV luminosity with decreasing spin-down power. We also find that the offsets of pulsars with ages around 10 kyr with respect to the wind nebula centres are frequently larger than can be plausibly explained by pulsar proper motion and could be due to an asymmetric environment. These and other results will be presented and put to context with a basic modelling of TeV pulsar wind nebula evolution.