Design and Tests of the Hard X-ray Polarimeter X-Calibur
Type of document
articlePeer-reviewed
publishedVersion
Author
Beilicke, M.
Cowsik, R.
Dowkontt, P.
Guo, Q.
Kislat, F.
Barthelmy, S.
Okajima, T.
Mitchell, J. W.
Schnittman, J.
Zeiger, B.
De Geronimo, G.
Baring, M. G.
Bodaghee, A.
Miyazawa, T.
Finkelstein, K. D.
Krawczynski, H.
Rights
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
openAccess
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
X-ray polarimetry promises to give qualitatively new information bout high-energy astrophysical sources, such as binary black hole systems, micro-quasars, active galactic nuclei, and gamma-ray bursts. We designed, built and tested ahard X-ray polarimeter, X-Calibur, to be used in the focal plane of the InFOCuS grazing incidence hard X-ray telescope.X-Calibur combines a low-Z Compton scatterer with a CZT detector assembly to measure the polarization of 20−60 keV X-rays making use of the fact that polarized photons Compton scatter preferentially perpendicular to the electric field orientation; in principal, a similar space-borne experiment could be operated in the 5−100 keV regime. X-Calibur achieves a high detection efficiency of order unity.
Collections
The following license files are associated with this item:
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License