Related papers: Proportional counters and microchannel plates
A concept for an all-sky monitor mission substantially more powerful than the RXTE ASM is presented in brief. It makes use of 31 Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) proportional counters to provide continuous monitoring of the entire x-ray sky,…
High-energy astrophysics is a relatively young scientific field, made possible by space-borne telescopes. During the half-century history of x-ray astronomy, the sensitivity of focusing x-ray telescopes-through finer angular resolution and…
A system of two microchannel-plate detectors has been successfully implemented for tracking projectile-fragmentation beams. The detectors provide interaction positions, angles, and arrival times of ions at the reaction target. The current…
X-rays provide one of the few bands through which we can study the epoch of reionization, when the first galaxies, black holes and stars were born. To reach the sensitivity required to image these first discrete objects in the universe…
Improving angular resolution is one of X-ray astronomy's big challenges. While X-ray interferometry should eventually vastly improve broad-band angular resolution, in the near-term, X-ray telescopes will sacrifice angular resolution for…
Thin filters and gas tight windows are used in Space to protect sensitive X-ray detectors from out-of-band electromagnetic radiation, low-energy particles, and molecular contamination. Though very thin and made of light materials, filters…
The spherical proportional counter is a large volume gaseous detector which finds application in several fields, including direct Dark Matter searches. When the detector is filled with nitrogen it becomes an effective neutron spectrometer…
Phase Fresnel lenses have the same imaging properties as zone plates, but with the possibility of concentrating all of the incident power into the primary focus, increasing the maximum theoretical efficiency from 11% to close to 100%. For…
Nowadays, commonly used Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) have counting rate capabilities of ~10E4Hz/cm2 and position resolutions of ~1cm. We have developed small prototypes of RPCs (5x5 and 10x10cm2) having rate capabilities of up to…
The prospects for accomplishing x-ray polarization measurements of astronomical sources have grown in recent years, after a hiatus of more than 37 years. Unfortunately, accompanying this long hiatus has been some confusion over the…
We performed a new series of systematic studies of gain and rate characteristics of several micropattern gaseous detectors. Extending earlier studies, these measurements were done at various pressures, gas mixtures, at a wide range of…
Future X-ray astrophysics missions will survey large areas of the sky with unparalleled sensitivity, enabled by lightweight, high-resolution optics. These optics inherently produce curved focal surfaces with radii as small as 2 m, requiring…
We have built and tested a compact, low-cost, but very-high-performance astronomical polarimeter based on a continuously rotating half-wave plate and a high-speed imaging detector. The polarimeter is suitable for small telescopes up to ~1 m…
Microchannel plates (MCPs) were the driving detector technology for ultraviolet (UV) astronomy over many years, and still today MCP-based detectors are the baseline for several planned UV instruments. The development of advanced MCP…
The X-ray Timing and Polarization (XTP) is a mission concept for a future space borne X-ray observatory and is currently selected for early phase study. We present a new design of X-ray polarimeter based on the time projection gas chamber.…
The concept and subsequent experimental verification of the proportionality between pulse amplitude and detector transit time for microchannel plate detectors is presented. This discovery has led to considerable improvement in the overall…
In recent decades, developments in detectors for X-ray imaging have improved dose efficiency. This has been accomplished with for example, structured scintillators such as columnar CsI, or with direct detectors where the X rays are…
The launch of the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), the first space-based polarimeter since 1978, offers a two order of magnitude improvement to the measurement of X-ray polarisation than its predecessor OSO-8, offering…
We describe a concept for a NASA SMEX Mission in which Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) detectors, developed at CERN, are adapted for use in X-ray astronomy. These detectors can be used to obtain moderately large detector area and…
In the last 25 years, a new generation of X-ray satellites imparted a significant leap forward in our knowledge of X-ray pulsars. The discovery of accreting and transitional millisecond pulsars proved that disk accretion can spin up a…