X-ray polarimetry on-board HXMT
Abstract
The development of micropixel gas detectors, capable to image tracks produced in a gas by photoelectrons, makes possible to perform polarimetry of X-ray celestial sources in the focus of grazing incidence X-ray telescopes. HXMT is a mission by the Chinese Space Agency aimed to survey the Hard X-ray Sky with Phoswich detectors, by exploitation of the direct demodulation technique. Since a fraction of the HXMT time will be spent on dedicated pointing of particular sources, it could host, with moderate additional resources a pair of X-ray telescopes, each with a photoelectric X-ray polarimeter (EXP2, Efficient X-ray Photoelectric Polarimeter) in the focal plane. We present the design of the telescopes and the focal plane instrumentation and discuss the performance of this instrument to detect the degree and angle of linear polarization of some representative sources. Notwithstanding the limited resources, the proposed instrument can represent a breakthrough in X-ray Polarimetry.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0810.2708,
title = {X-ray polarimetry on-board HXMT},
author = {Paolo Soffitta and Ronaldo Bellazzini and Gianpiero Tagliaferri and Enrico Costa and Giovanni Pareschi and Stefano Basso and Vincenzo Cotroneo and Massimo Frutti and Francesco Lazzarotto and Fabio Muleri and Alda Rubini and Gloria Spandre and Alessandro Brez and Luca Baldini and Jean Bregeon and Massimo Minuti and Giorgio Matt and Filippo Frontera},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0810.2708},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
10 pages, 7 figures