The Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope: Simulation of the Instrument Performance for Gamma-Ray Detection
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
3-18-2022
Abstract
We present simulations of the instrument performance of the Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope (APT), a mission concept of a γ-ray and cosmic-ray observatory in a sun-Earth Lagrange orbit. The key components of the APT detector include a multiple-layer tracker composed of scintillating fibers and an imaging calorimeter composed of thin layers of CsI:Na scintillators. The design is aimed at maximizing effective area and field of view for γ-ray and cosmic-ray measurements, subject to constraints on instrument cost and total payload mass. We simulate a detector design based on 3-meter scintillating fibers and develop reconstruction algorithms for γ-rays from a few hundreds of keV up to a few TeV energies. At the photon energy above 30 MeV, pair-production/shower reconstruction is applied; the results show that APT could provide an order of magnitude improvement in effective area and sensitivity for γ-ray detection compared with the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). A multiple-Compton-scattering reconstruction at photon energies below 10 MeV achieves sensitive detection of faint γ-ray bursts (GRBs) and other γ-ray transients down to ∼ 0.01 MeV/cm2 with degree-level to sub-degree-level localization accuracy. The Compton analysis also provides a measurement of polarization where the minimum detectable degree of polarization for ∼ 1 MeV/cm2 GRBs is below 20%. In addition to the APT simulations, we present the simulated performance of the Antarctic Demonstrator for APT, a 0.5m-square cross section balloon experiment that includes all of the key elements of the full APT detector.
Publication Source (Journal or Book title)
Proceedings of Science
Recommended Citation
Alnussirat, S., Altomare, C., Bose, R., Braun, D., Buckley, J., Buhler, J., Burns, E., Chamberlain, R., Chen, W., Cherry, M., Di Venere, L., Dumonthier, J., Errando, M., Funk, S., Giordano, F., Hoffman, J., Hughes, Z., Huth, D., Kelly, P., Krizmanic, J., Kuwahara, M., Licciulli, F., Liu, G., Mazziotta, M., Mitchell, J., Mitchell, J., de Nolfo, G., Paoletti, R., Pillera, R., Rauch, B., Serini, D., Simburger, G., & Sudvarg, M. (2022). The Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope: Simulation of the Instrument Performance for Gamma-Ray Detection. Proceedings of Science, 395 Retrieved from https://repository.lsu.edu/physics_astronomy_pubs/6664