Anomalous X-ray pulsars: Persistent states with fallback disks

The anomalous X-ray pulsar 4U 0142+61 was recently detected in the mid infrared bands with the SPITZER Observatory (Wang, Chakrabarty and Kaplan: Nature 440, 772 (2006)). This observation is the first instance for a disk around an AXP. From a reanalysis of optical and infrared data, we show that the observations indicate that the disk is likely to be an active disk rather than a passive dust disk beyond the light cylinder, as proposed in the discovering paper. Furthermore, we show that the irradiated accretion disk model can also account for all the optical and infrared observations of the anomalous X-ray pulsars in the persistent state.