2011/01/03 by Q. Guo, Qingzhen Guo, Alfred Garson +13
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced X-ray and CT Imaging #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Nuclear Physics and Applications #X-ray Spectroscopy and Fluorescence Analysis #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1101.0595
5 pages, 6 figures, 2010 IEEE NSS/MIC conference, Knoxville
arxiv created 2011/01/03 · openalex publication_date 2011/01/03 · arxiv updated 2011/01/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We report on Monte Carlo studies of the hard X-ray polarimeter X-Calibur. The polarimeter will be used in the focal plane of a grazing incidence hard X-ray telescope. It combines a low-Z Compton scatterer with a high-Z Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CZT) detector assembly to measure the polarization of 10 keV - 80 keV X-rays. X-Calibur makes use of the fact that polarized photons Compton scatter preferentially perpendicular to the electric field orientation. In contrast of competing designs, which use only a small fraction of the incoming X-rays, X-Calibur achieves a high detection efficiency of order unity. In this contributions, we discuss a Monte Carlo study which compares X-Calibur's polarimeteric performance achieved using different scattering materials (Scintillator, Be, LiH, Li), and calculate the sensitivity of X-Calibur when used with different balloon-borne and space-borne mirror assemblies.