Planck pre-launch status : The Planck mission

Peer reviewe

Design concepts for the Cherenkov Telescope Array CTA: an advanced facility for ground-based high-energy gamma-ray astronomy

Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has had a major breakthrough with the impressive results obtained using systems of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has a huge potential in astrophysics, particle physics and cosmology. CTA is an international initiative to build the next generation instrument, with a factor of 5-10 improvement in sensitivity in the 100 GeV-10 TeV range and the extension to energies well below 100 GeV and above 100 TeV. CTA will consist of two arrays (one in the north, one in the south) for full sky coverage and will be operated as open observatory. The design of CTA is based on currently available technology. This document reports on the status and presents the major design concepts of CTA

The Simbol-X Anticoincidence

ISBN: 978-0-07354-0662-9International audienceThe Simbol-X telescope will be constitued by two satellites in formation flight. One will host the mirror module and the other the detector payload. This payload will be built with two main detectors able to measure the position, energy and arrival time of each focused photon, between 0.5 and 80 keV. The high sensitivity required by Simbol-X will necessitate low noise background detectors. To achieve this goal, those detectors will be surrounded by a passive graded shield, aimed to stop the out of field of view photons, and an active anticoïncidence system to tag the passing particles. This anticoïncidence detector, whose conception, optimisation and realization are under responsibility of the APC Laboratory, Paris, is based on plastic scintillator plates associated to multi-anodes photo-multipliers via optical fibers. In this paper, we will present the present status of the anticoïncidence system and its expected performances