Polars - soft X-ray emitters?

The defining criterion of polars (AM Herculis stars) was their prominent soft X-ray emission, which led to numerous discoveries with the EINSTEIN, EXOSAT, ROSAT and EUVE satellites. XMM-Newton observations of those X-ray selected polars and genuine discoveries of new polar systems reveal growing evidence that the prevailence or even the existence of a soft X-ray component may be rather the exception than the rule. In the last decade polars were discovered in optical surveys like the SDSS and the CSS. Here we propose XMM-Newton observations of 5 optically selected polars to search for soft X-ray spectral components, answer the question why they escaped detection in past X-ray surveys and shed new light on the intrinsic energy distribution of polars.