1 research outputs found
X-ray polarimetry on-board HXMT
The development of micropixel gas detectors, capable to image tracks produced
in a gas by photoelectrons, makes possible to perform polarimetry of X-ray
celestial sources in the focus of grazing incidence X-ray telescopes. HXMT is a
mission by the Chinese Space Agency aimed to survey the Hard X-ray Sky with
Phoswich detectors, by exploitation of the direct demodulation technique. Since
a fraction of the HXMT time will be spent on dedicated pointing of particular
sources, it could host, with moderate additional resources a pair of X-ray
telescopes, each with a photoelectric X-ray polarimeter (EXP2, Efficient X-ray
Photoelectric Polarimeter) in the focal plane. We present the design of the
telescopes and the focal plane instrumentation and discuss the performance of
this instrument to detect the degree and angle of linear polarization of some
representative sources. Notwithstanding the limited resources, the proposed
instrument can represent a breakthrough in X-ray Polarimetry.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure