Design and Performance of the X-ray polarimeter X-Calibur
Abstract
X-ray polarimetry promises to give qualitatively new information about high-energy astrophysical sources, such as binary black hole systems, micro-quasars, active galactic nuclei, neutron stars, and gamma-ray bursts. We designed, built and tested a X-ray polarimeter, X-Calibur, to be used in the focal plane of the balloon-borne InFOCuS grazing incidence X-ray telescope. X-Calibur combines a low-Z scatterer with a CZT detector assembly to measure the polarization of 20-80keV X-rays making use of the fact that polarized photons scatter preferentially perpendicular to the electric field orientation. X-Calibur achieves a high detection efficiency of ~80%. The X-Calibur detector assembly is completed, tested, and fully calibrated. The response to a polarized X-ray beam was measured successfully at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source. This paper describes the design, calibration and performance of the X-Calibur polarimeter. In principle, a similar space-borne scattering polarimeter could operate over the broader 2-100keV energy band.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1412.6457,
title = {Design and Performance of the X-ray polarimeter X-Calibur},
author = {Matthias Beilicke and F. Kislat and A. Zajczyk and Q. Guo and R. Endsley and M. Stork and R. Cowsik and P. Dowkontt and S. Barthelmy and T. Hams and T. Okajima and M. Sasaki and B. Zeiger and G. De Geronimo and M. G. Baring and H. Krawczynski},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6457},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
53 pages, 32 figures, accepted by the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation