Optimization of the design of the hard X-ray polarimeter X-Calibur |
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| Institution: | 1. Washington University in St. Louis, Department of Physics and McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences, 1 Brookings Dr., CB 1105, St. Louis, MO 63130, United States;2. Northwestern Polytechnical University, State Key Laboratory of Solidification Processing, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Xi’an 710072, PR China;3. University of Notre Dame, Department of Physics, 225 Nieuwland Science Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, United States;1. Vignan’s Institute of Information Technology, Duvvada, Visakhapatnam 530049, Andhra Pradesh, India;2. Department of Chemistry, GITAM Institute of Science, GITAM University, Visakhapatnam 530045, Andhra Pradesh, India;3. School of Chemistry & Physics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville Campus, Private Bag X54001, Durban 4000, South Africa;1. College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan Province, 410083, PR China;2. Key Lab of Organic Optoelectronics and Molecular Engineering of Ministry of Education, Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, PR China |
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| Abstract: | We report on the optimization of the hard X-ray polarimeter X-Calibur for a high-altitude balloon-flight in the focal plane of the InFOCμS X-ray telescope from Fort Sumner (NM) in Fall 2013. X-Calibur combines a low-Z scintillator slab to Compton-scatter photons with a high-Z Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CZT) detector assembly to photo-absorb the scattered photons. The detector makes use of the fact that polarized photons Compton scatter preferentially perpendicular to the electric field orientation. X-Calibur achieves a high detection efficiency of order unity and reaches a sensitivity close to the best theoretically possible. In this paper, we discuss the optimization of the design of the instrument based on Monte Carlo simulations of polarized and unpolarized X-ray beams and of the most important background components. We calculate the sensitivity of the polarimeter for the upcoming balloon flight from Fort Sumner and for additional longer balloon flights with higher throughput mirrors. We conclude by emphasizing that Compton polarimeters on satellite borne missions can be used down to energies of a few keV. |
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