19 June 2020 Performance simulation of the soft gamma-ray concentrator
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Abstract

The soft gamma-ray concentrator is a telescope mission concept utilizing a suitable arrangement of bent multilayer structures of alternating low- and high-density materials. This lens is able to channel gamma-ray photons via total external reflection and concentrate the incident radiation to a point. The channeling technique offers the potential for concentrating gamma rays with focal lengths <10  m and energies >100  keV, beyond the reach of current grazing-incidence hard x-ray mirrors. For the performance estimation of such an instrument, we have developed a flexible set of computer modeling tools to compute the optical properties of multilayer structures, predict the channeling efficiency for a given multilayer configuration, and aid in the optimization of potential gamma-ray concentrator-based telescope designs. This modeling includes the multilayer optical properties calculated by the IMD software, the ray tracing using an IDL code, and the focal plane detector simulation by MEGAlib. We illustrate the potential of this approach by presenting simulated astronomical observations from a balloon-borne platform. The final result, including simulated effective area, instrument sensitivity, and polarization performance, shows that the gamma-ray concentrator will provide greatly increased sensitivity for next-generation soft gamma-ray missions with modest cost and complexity.

© 2020 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) 2329-4124/2020/$28.00 © 2020 SPIE
Farzane Shirazi, Peter F. Bloser, Jason S. Legere, and Mark McConnell "Performance simulation of the soft gamma-ray concentrator," Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 6(2), 024001 (19 June 2020). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.6.2.024001
Received: 8 October 2019; Accepted: 4 June 2020; Published: 19 June 2020
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KEYWORDS
Gamma radiation

Solar concentrators

Sensors

Device simulation

Reflectivity

Multilayers

Photons

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