English

Advancing Precision Particle Background Estimation for Future X-ray Missions: Correlated Variability between AMS and Chandra/XMM-Newton

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2024-05-13 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Galactic cosmic ray (GCR) particles have a significant impact on the particle-induced background of X-ray observatories, and their flux exhibits substantial temporal variability, potentially influencing background levels. In this study, we present one-day binned high-energy reject rates derived from the Chandra-ACIS and XMM-Newton EPIC-pn instruments, serving as proxies for GCR particle flux. We systematically analyze the ACIS and EPIC-pn reject rates and compare them with the AMS proton flux. Our analysis initially reveals robust correlations between the AMS proton flux and the ACIS/EPIC-pn reject rates when binned over 27-day intervals. However, a closer examination reveals substantial fluctuations within each 27-day bin, indicating shorter-term variability. Upon daily binning, we observe finer. temporal structures in the datasets, demonstrating the presence of recurrent variations with periods of \sim 25 days and 23 days in ACIS and EPIC-pn reject rates, respectively, spanning the years 2014 to 2018. Notably, during the 2016--2017 period, we additionally detect periodicities of \sim13.5 days and 9 days in the ACIS and EPIC-pn reject rates, respectively. Intriguingly, we observe a time lag of \sim 6 days between the AMS proton flux and the ACIS/EPIC-pn reject rates during the second half of 2016. This time lag is not visible before 2016 and aftern2017. The underlying physical mechanisms responsible for this time lag remain a subject of ongoing investigation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.06602,
  title  = {Advancing Precision Particle Background Estimation for Future X-ray Missions: Correlated Variability between AMS and Chandra/XMM-Newton},
  author = {Arnab Sarkar and Catherine E. Grant and Eric D. Miller and Mark Bautz and Benjamin Schneider and Rick F. Foster and Gerrit Schellenberger and Steven Allen and Ralph P. Kraft and Dan Wilkins and Abe Falcone and Andrew Ptak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.06602},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

16 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ