Hard x-ray polarimetry with a thick CdTe position sensitive spectrometer

Ezio Caroli; Giuseppe Bertuccio; Adriano Cola; Rui M. Curado da Silva; Ariano Donati; Waldes Dusi; Gianni Landini; Paul Siffert; Marco Sampietro; John Buchan Stephen

doi:10.1117/12.409157

13 December 2000 Hard x-ray polarimetry with a thick CdTe position sensitive spectrometer

Ezio Caroli, Giuseppe Bertuccio, Adriano Cola, Rui M. Curado da Silva, Ariano Donati, Waldes Dusi, Gianni Landini, Paul Siffert, Marco Sampietro, John Buchan Stephen

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 4140, X-Ray and Gamma-Ray Instrumentation for Astronomy XI; (2000) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.409157
Event: International Symposium on Optical Science and Technology, 2000, San Diego, CA, United States

Abstract

Even though it is recognized that the study of polarization from cosmic high-energy sources can give very important information about the nature of the emission mechanism, to date very few measurements have been attempted. For several years we have proposed the use of a thick CdTe array as a position sensitive spectrometer for hard X- and soft gamma-ray astronomy, a design which is also efficient for use as a polarimeter at energies above approximately 100 keV. Herein we describe the preliminary results of our study of a polarimeter based on 4096 CdTe microcrystals that we would like to develop for a high altitude balloon experiment. We present the telescope concept with a description of each subsystem together with some results on activities devoted to the optimization of the CdTe detector units' response. Furthermore we give an evaluation of the telescope performance in terms of achievable spectroscopic and polarimetric performance. In particular we will show the results of Monte Carlo simulations developed to evaluate the efficiency of our detector as a hard X ray polarimeter.

Citation Download Citation

Ezio Caroli, Giuseppe Bertuccio, Adriano Cola, Rui M. Curado da Silva, Ariano Donati, Waldes Dusi, Gianni Landini, Paul Siffert, Marco Sampietro, and John Buchan Stephen "Hard x-ray polarimetry with a thick CdTe position sensitive spectrometer", Proc. SPIE 4140, X-Ray and Gamma-Ray Instrumentation for Astronomy XI, (13 December 2000); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.409157

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