The energy budget of soft X-ray selected polars

Since the early days of Xray astronomy one of the central questions in ourunderstanding of accretion onto magnetic white dwarfs in compact binaries iswhether their observed ratio between soft and hard Xray emission is inaccordance with theoretical expectations or not. We propose to address thisissue with XMMNewton observations of a sample of soft Xray selected polarsfrom the ROSAT AllSky Survey. The Xray characteristics of our sample membersare complementary to the parameter space covered by observations of polars inthe XMMNewton GTO programme. A detailed study of the spectral components, theirflux contributions, and the physical structure of the accretion regions in thesesystems will, therefore, provide new insight into this longlasting problem. truncated!, Please see actual data for full text [truncated!, Please see actual data for full text]