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EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik
EP 9: Poster
EP 9.5: Poster
Wednesday, March 22, 2023, 17:30–19:00, HSZ OG1
ComPol - A Compton polarimeter in a Nanosat — •Matthias Meier for the ComPol collaboration — Excellence Cluster ORIGINS, Garching, Germany — Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany
It is hardly possible to resolve the geometry of astrophysical compact objects due to their small size. One possibility to indirectly learn about their structure are polarization measurements. Especially in the hard X-ray range polarization data is still partially missing. Therefore, the aim of the CubeSat mission ComPol is to improve the physical model of the black hole binary system Cygnus X-1 by measuring the polarization of its hard X-ray spectrum (20-200keV).
The detector system developed for the ComPol project is composed of a Silicon drift detector used as a scatterer and a CeBr3 scintillator read out by a SiPM matrix. From the scintillation light distribution it is possible to determine the absorption position in the CeBr3 which is done to capture the full Compton kinematics. The next step is to perform an event-wise reconstruction from the measured energies and interaction points. The resulting distribution of the azimuthal scatter angles allows to directly infer the polarization of the initial radiation.
The talk will give an overview of the scientific motivation, the underlying physics and the detector setup.
This research is supported by the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy - EXC-2094-390783311