2006A&A...448..873G

Two observation campaigns in 2003 and 2004 with the INTEGRAL satellite have provided the first sensitive survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud with an imaging instrument in the hard X-ray range (15keV-10MeV). The high energy flux and long-term variability of the black hole candidate LMC X-1 was measured for the first time without contamination by the nearby (∼25') young pulsar PSR B0540-69. We studied the accreting pulsar LMC X-4 by constraining the size of the hard X-ray emitting region (≤3x10¹⁰cm) from analysis of its eclipses and by measuring its spin period (13.497±0.005s) in the 20-40keV band. As it was in a soft state during the first observation and possibly in an extremely low state in the second one, LMC X-3 was not detected. Thanks to the large field of view of the IBIS instrument, we could also study other sources falling serendipitously in the observed sky region around the LMC: the Galactic low mass X-ray binary EXO 0748-676, the accreting pulsar SMC X-1 in the Small Magellanic Cloud, and the Active Galactic Nucleus IRAS 04575-7537. In addition we discovered five new hard X-ray sources, two of which most likely belong to the LMC.