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Observational evidence has been accumulating that thermonuclear X-ray burstsignited on the surface of neutron stars influence the surrounding accretionflow. Here, we exploit the excellent sensitivity of NuSTAR up to 79 keV toanalyze the impact of an X-ray burst on the accretion emission of the neutronstar LMXB 4U 1608-52. The ~200 s long X-ray burst occurred during a hard X-rayspectral state, and had a peak intensity of ~30-50 per cent of the Eddingtonlimit with no signs of photospheric radius expansion. Spectral analysissuggests that the accretion emission was enhanced up to a factor of ~5 duringthe X-ray burst. We also applied a linear unsupervised decomposition method,namely non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), to study this X-ray burst. Wefind that the NMF performs well in characterizing the evolution of the burstemission and is a promising technique to study changes in the underlyingaccretion emission in more detail than is possible through conventionalspectral fitting. For the burst of 4U 1608-52, the NMF suggests a possiblesoftening of the accretion spectrum during the X-ray burst, which couldpotentially be ascribed to cooling of a corona. Finally, we report a small (~3per cent) but significant rise in the accretion emission ~0.5 h before theX-ray burst, although it is unclear whether this was related to the X-ray burstignition.

Probing the effects of a thermonuclear X-ray burst on the neutron star accretion flow with NuSTAR