Origins of the instrumental background of the x-ray CCD camera in space studied with Monte Carlo simulation

Hiroshi Murakami; Masaki Kitsunezuka; Masanobu Ozaki; Tadayasu Dotani; Takayasu Anada

doi:10.1117/12.671235

15 June 2006 Origins of the instrumental background of the x-ray CCD camera in space studied with Monte Carlo simulation

Hiroshi Murakami, Masaki Kitsunezuka, Masanobu Ozaki, Tadayasu Dotani, Takayasu Anada

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 6266, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation II: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray; 62662Y (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.671235
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2006, Orlando, Florida , United States

Abstract

We report on the origin of the instrumental background of the X-ray CCD camera in space obtained from the Monte Carlo simulation with GEANT4. In the space environment, CCD detects many non-X-ray events, which are produced by the interactions of high-energy particles with the materials surrounding CCD. Most of these events are rejected through the analysis of the charge split pattern, but some are remained to be background. Such instrumental background need to be reduced to achieve higher sensitivity especially above several keV. We simulated the interactions of the cosmic-rays with the CCD housing, and extracted the background events which escaped from the screening process by the charge split pattern. We could reproduce the observed spectral shape of the instrumental background of Suzaku XIS on orbit with the Monte Carlo simulation. This means that the simulation succeeded to duplicate the background production process in space. From the simulation, we found that the major components of the background in the front-side illuminated CCD are the recoil electrons produced by the Compton-scattering of the hard X-ray photons in the CCD. On the other hand, for the backside illuminated CCD, contribution from the low energy electrons becomes dominant, which are produced by the interactions of cosmic-ray protons or hard X-rays with the housing. These results may be important to design the X-ray CCD camera for the future missions, such as NeXT.

Citation Download Citation

Hiroshi Murakami, Masaki Kitsunezuka, Masanobu Ozaki, Tadayasu Dotani, and Takayasu Anada "Origins of the instrumental background of the x-ray CCD camera in space studied with Monte Carlo simulation", Proc. SPIE 6266, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation II: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 62662Y (15 June 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.671235

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