In-Orbit Instrument Performance Study and Calibration for POLAR Polarization Measurements
Abstract
POLAR is a compact space-borne detector designed to perform reliable measurements of the polarization for transient sources like Gamma-Ray Bursts in the energy range 50-500keV. The instrument works based on the Compton Scattering principle with the plastic scintillators as the main detection material along with the multi-anode photomultiplier tube. POLAR has been launched successfully onboard the Chinese space laboratory TG-2 on 15th September, 2016. In order to reliably reconstruct the polarization information a highly detailed understanding of the instrument is required for both data analysis and Monte Carlo studies. For this purpose a full study of the in-orbit performance was performed in order to obtain the instrument calibration parameters such as noise, pedestal, gain nonlinearity of the electronics, threshold, crosstalk and gain, as well as the effect of temperature on the above parameters. Furthermore the relationship between gain and high voltage of the multi-anode photomultiplier tube has been studied and the errors on all measurement values are presented. Finally the typical systematic error on polarization measurements of Gamma-Ray Bursts due to the measurement error of the calibration parameters are estimated using Monte Carlo simulations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1805.07605,
title = {In-Orbit Instrument Performance Study and Calibration for POLAR Polarization Measurements},
author = {Zhengheng Li and Merlin Kole and Jianchao Sun and Liming Song and Nicolas Produit and Bobing Wu and Tianwei Bao and Tancredi Bernasconi and Franck Cadoux and Yongwei Dong and Minzi Feng and Neal Gauvin and Wojtek Hajdas and Hancheng Li and Lu Li and Xin Liu and Radoslaw Marcinkowski and Martin Pohl and Dominik K. Rybka and Haoli Shi and Jacek Szabelski and Teresa Tymieniecka and Ruijie Wang and Yuanhao Wang and Xing Wen and Xin Wu and Shaolin Xiong and Anna Zwolinska and Li Zhang and Laiyu Zhang and Shuangnan Zhang and Yongjie Zhang and Yi Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.07605},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
43 pages, 30 figures, 1 table; Preprint accepted by NIMA