Issue |
A&A
Volume 672, April 2023
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A66 | |
Number of page(s) | 17 | |
Section | Astronomical instrumentation | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202245744 | |
Published online | 31 March 2023 |
Polarisation leakage due to errors in track reconstruction in gas pixel detectors
1
INAF – Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri,
Largo Enrico Fermi 5,
50125
Firenze, Italy
e-mail: niccolo.bucciantini@inaf.it
2
Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università degli Studi di Firenze,
via G. Sansone 1,
Sesto F.no (FI), Italy
3
INFN – Sezione di Firenze,
via G. Sansone 1,
Sesto F.no (FI), Italy
4
Department of Physics and Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University,
452 Lomita Mall,
Stanford, CA
94305, USA
5
INFN – Sezione di Pisa,
Largo Bruno Pontecorvo 3,
56127
Pisa (PI), Italy
6
Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Pisa,
Largo Bruno Pontecorvo 3,
56127
Pisa (PI), Italy
7
University of Maryland, Baltimore County,
Baltimore,
620 W. Lexington St.,
MD 21250, USA
8
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center,
8800 Greenbelt Rd.,
Greenbelt, MD
20771, USA
9
Center for Research and Exploration in Space Science and Technology, NASA/GSFC,
8800 Greenbelt Rd.,
Greenbelt, MD
20771, USA
10
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center,
4600 Rideout Rd.,
Huntsville, AL
35812, USA
Received:
21
December
2022
Accepted:
1
February
2023
X-ray polarimetry based on gas pixel detectors (GPDs) has reached a high level of maturity thanks to the Imaging X-ray Polarimeter Explorer (IXPE) providing the first-ever spatially resolved polarimetric measurements. However, as this a new technique, a few unexpected effects have emerged in the course of in-flight operations. In particular, it was almost immediately found that, the unpolarized calibration sources on-board were showing radially polarized halos. The origin of these features was recognized in a correlation between the error in reconstructing the absorption point of the X-ray photon and the direction of its electric field vector. Here, we present and discuss this effect in detail, showing that it is possible to provide a simple and robust mathematical formalism to handle it. We further show its role and relevance for the recent IXPE measures as well as for the use of GPD-based techniques in general. We also illustrate how to model it in the context of studying extended sources.
Key words: instrumentation: detectors / instrumentation: polarimeters / techniques: polarimetric / X-rays: general / polarization
© The Authors 2023
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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