The search for low-luminosity high-mass X-ray binaries and the study of X-ray populations in the Galactic disk

High-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs), which consist of a neutron star (NS) or black hole (BH) accreting material from a massive stellar companion, provide valuable insights into the evolution of massive stars and the merger rates of NS/NS, NS/BH, and BH/BH binaries whose gravitational wave signatures will soon be detectable by facilities such as Advanced-LIGO. INTEGRAL discoveries of new classes of lower-luminosity HMXBs, some highly obscured and some showing extreme transient activity, as well as the recent discovery of the very quiescent and only known Be-BH binary, have considerably changed our understanding of clumping in massive stellar winds and the relative importance of different binary evolutionary channels. In order to better characterize the low-luminosity HMXB population, we have performed a survey of a square degree region in the direction of the Norma spiral arm with Chandra and NuSTAR. These surveys, combined with optical and infrared spectroscopic follow-up of the counterparts of hard X-ray sources, have yielded three HMXB candidates to date. Future radial-velocity follow-up of these candidates, as well as other Be HMXB candidates from the NuSTAR serendipitous survey, will help determine whether these sources truly are HMXBs and, if so, constrain the mass of the compact object in these systems. If confirmed, these HMXB candidates could extend our measurement of the HMXB luminosity function by about two orders of magnitude and provide important constraints on massive binary evolutionary models. In addition, the colliding wind binaries and pulsar wind nebulae discovered in the Norma X-ray survey will help shed light on other aspects of massive stellar evolution and massive stellar remnants. Finally, these surveys provide the opportunity to compare the hard X-ray populations in the Galactic disk and the Galactic Center. While the dominant hard X-ray populations in both of these Galactic regions appear to be cataclysmic variables (CVs), those in the Norma survey tend to have lower plasma temperatures than those in the Galactic Center, suggesting that the white dwarfs in Galactic Center CVs may have typical masses and/or magnetic field strengths that are higher than those of white dwarfs in the disk.