Ronaldo Bellazzini,1 F. Angelini,1 Luca Baldini,1 Alessandro Brez,1 Enrico Costa,2 Giuseppe Di Persio,2 Luca Latronico,1 M. M. Massai,1 Nicola Omodei,1 Luigi Pacciani,2 Paolo Soffitta,2 Gloria Spandre1
1INFN/Pisa (Italy) 2Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale-CNR (Italy)
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.
We report on a new instrument that brings high efficiency to x-ray polarimetry, which is the last unexplored field of x-ray astronomy. It derives the polarization information from the tracks of the photoelectrons imaged by a finely subdivided gas pixel detector. The device can also do simultaneously good imaging, moderate spectroscopy and fast, high rate timing down to 150 eV. Moreover, being truly 2D, it is non dispersive and does not require rotation. The great immprovement of sensitivity will allow direct exploration of the most dramatic objects of the x-ray sky; with integrations of the order of one day we could perform polarimetry of Active Galactic Nuclei at the percent level, a breakthrough in this fascinating window of high energy astrophysics.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.
The alert did not successfully save. Please try again later.
Ronaldo Bellazzini, F. Angelini, Luca Baldini, Alessandro Brez, Enrico Costa, Giuseppe Di Persio, Luca Latronico, M. M. Massai, Nicola Omodei, Luigi Pacciani, Paolo Soffitta, Gloria Spandre, "Micropattern gas detector for x-ray polarimetry," Proc. SPIE 4843, Polarimetry in Astronomy, (14 February 2003); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.459380