Imaging Polarimeter for a Sub-MeV Gamma-Ray All-sky Survey Using an Electron-tracking Compton Camera

S. Komura, A. Takada, Y. Mizumura, S. Miyamoto, T. Takemura, T. Kishimoto, H. Kubo, S. Kurosawa, Y. Matsuoka, K. Miuchi, T. Mizumoto, Y. Nakamasu (+8 others)
2017 Astrophysical Journal  
X-ray and gamma-ray polarimetry is a promising tool to study the geometry and the magnetic configuration of various celestial objects, such as binary black holes or gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). However, statistically significant polarizations have been detected in few of the brightest objects. Even though future polarimeters using X-ray telescopes are expected to observe weak persistent sources, there are no effective approaches to survey transient and serendipitous sources with a wide field of
more » ... (FoV). Here we present an electron-tracking Compton camera (ETCC) as a highly-sensitive gamma-ray imaging polarimeter. The ETCC provides powerful background rejection and a high modulation factor over a FoV of up to 2π sr thanks to its excellent imaging based on a well-defined point spread function. Importantly, we demonstrated for the first time the stability of the modulation factor under realistic conditions of off-axis incidence and huge backgrounds using the SPring-8 polarized X-ray beam. The measured modulation factor of the ETCC was 0.65 ± 0.01 at 150 keV for an off-axis incidence with an oblique angle of 30^∘ and was not degraded compared to the 0.58 ± 0.02 at 130 keV for on-axis incidence. These measured results are consistent with the simulation results. Consequently, we found that the satellite-ETCC proposed in Tanimori et al. (2015) would provide all-sky surveys of weak persistent sources of 13 mCrab with 10 6×10^-6 erg cm^-2 fluence and 10 observation.
doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aa68dc fatcat:isb4lgsn3bdibjptyhxtwqflt4