Related papers: High-angular-precision gamma-ray astronomy and pol…
X-ray polarimetry is now providing a new way to look at the high energy sky. The addition of two observables, polarization fraction and angle, reveals crucial new information on the structure of accretion flows and magnetic fields in…
Prepared for the 2014 ISAPP summer school, this review is focused on space-borne and balloon-borne cosmic-ray and gamma-ray detectors. It is meant to introduce the fundamental concepts necessary to understand the instrument performance…
X-ray binary systems consist of a companion star and a compact object in close orbit. Thanks to their copious X-ray emission, these objects have been studied in detail using X-ray spectroscopy and timing. The inclination of these systems is…
High energy gamma-ray astronomy has recently made significant progresss through ground-based instruments like the {\it H.E.S.S.} array of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. The unprecedented angular resolution and the large field of…
Polarimetry remains a largely unexploited technique in observational X-ray astronomy which could provide insight in the study of the strong gravity and magnetic fields at the core of the Constellation-X observational program. Adding a…
Gamma-ray polarimetry is a new powerful tool to study the processes responsible for the emission from astrophysical sources and the environments in which this emission takes place. Few successful polarimetric measurements have however been…
This thesis deals with detector concepts aiming at a precise measurement of the cosmic-ray positron fraction extending to an as yet unreached range of energy. The indirect search for dark matter is the main motivation for this endeavour.
This paper reviews the field of gamma-ray astronomy and describes future experiments and prospects for advances in fundamental physics and high-energy astrophysics through gamma-ray measurements. We concentrate on recent progress in the…
An extensive theoretical literature predicts that X-ray Polarimetry can directly determine relevant physical and geometrical parameters of astrophysical sources, and discriminate between models further than allowed by spectral and timing…
The last decade has seen the emergence of two new fields within astrophysics: gamma ray polarimetry and GW astronomy. The former, which aims to measure the polarization of gamma rays in the energy range of 10s to 100s of keV, from…
We show that the parameter space of axion-like particles can be severly constrained using high-precision measurements of quasar polarisations. Robust limits are derived from the measured bounds on optical circular polarisation and from the…
X-ray polarimetry promises to give new information about high-energy astrophysical sources, such as binary black hole systems, micro-quasars, active galactic nuclei, and gamma-ray bursts. We designed, built and tested a hard X-ray…
A breakthrough in the sensitivity level of the hard X-/gamma-ray telescopes, which today are based on detectors that view the sky through (or not) coded masks, is expected when focusing optics will be available also in this energy range.…
Some pulsars have their maximum observable energy output in the gamma-ray band, offering the possibility of using these high-energy photons as probes of the particle acceleration and interaction processes in pulsar magnetospheres. After an…
Thanks to IXPE , the X-ray spectro-polarimeter launched at the end of 2021, X-ray polarimetry has finally become an extraordinary tool in investigating the physics of accretion in low mass X-ray binaries. Similarly to what happened with…
In this contribution I review the present status and discuss some prospects for indirect detection of dark matter with gamma-rays. Thanks to the Fermi Large Area Telescope, searches in gamma-rays have reached sensitivities that allow to…
While tunable filters are a recent development in night time astronomy, they have long been used in other physical sciences, e.g. solar physics, remote sensing and underwater communications. With their ability to tune precisely to a given…
Extraterrestrial gamma-ray astronomy is now a source of new knowledge in the fields of astrophysics, cosmic-ray physics, and the nature of dark matter. The next absolutely necessary step in the development of extraterrestrial high-energy…
The past five years have seen a rapid rise in the use of tunable filters in many diverse fields of astronomy, through Taurus Tunable Filter (TTF) instruments at the Anglo-Australian and William Herschel Telescopes. Over this time we have…
The Lightweight Asymmetry and Magnetism Probe (LAMP) is a micro-satellite mission concept dedicated for astronomical X-ray polarimetry and is currently under early phase study. It consists of segmented paraboloidal multilayer mirrors with a…