Performance of the Swift X-ray Telescope (XRT) Mirror/Detector Combination

Short, A.; Ambrosi, Richard M.; Hutchinson, Ian; Willingale, R.; Abbey, A. F.; Wells, A.; Hill, J. E.; Burrows, D. N.; Tagliaferri, G.; Citterio, O.

doi:10.1063/1.1579416

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The Q software 1 is a sequential X-ray tracing package, which has been developed by R. Willingale at the University of Leicester, for simulations of different X-ray focusing telescopes including square Micro-Pore Optics (MPO). This package has been used for simulations of the conventional Wolter I shells like the Swift-XRT, Silicon Pore Optics (SPO) and the Wolter I optics implemented using square pore optics for MIXS-T aboard the Bepicolombo satellite [12,13,14,15]. In this section, we make some comparisons with the relevant results obtained by using Q software to verify that Geant4 with XRTG4 can be applied to the simulations of X-ray reflection and scattering at grazing angles.…”

Section: X-ray Tracingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geant4 simulations of a wide-angle x-ray focusing telescope

et al. 2017

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The rapid development of X-ray astronomy has been made possible by widely deploying X-ray focusing telescopes on board many X-ray satellites. Geant4 is a very powerful toolkit for Monte Carlo simulations and has remarkable abilities to model complex geometrical configurations. However, the library of physical processes available in Geant4 lacks a description of the reflection of X-ray photons at a grazing incident angle which is the core physical process in the simulation of X-ray focusing telescopes. The scattering of low-energy charged particles from the mirror surfaces is another noteworthy process which is not yet incorporated into Geant4.Here we describe a Monte Carlo model of a simplified wide-angle X-ray focusing telescope adopting lobster-eye optics and a silicon detector using the Geant4 toolkit. With this model, we simulate the X-ray tracing, proton scattering and background detection. We find that: (1) the effective area obtained using Geant4 is in agreement with that obtained using Q software with an average difference of less than 3%; (2) X-rays are the dominant background source below 10 keV; (3) the sensitivity of the telescope is better by at least one order of magnitude than that of a coded mask telescope with the same physical dimensions; (4) the number of protons passing through the optics and reaching the detector by Firsov scattering is about 2.5 times that of multiple scattering for the lobster-eye telescope.

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Section: X-ray Tracingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geant4 simulations of a wide-angle x-ray focusing telescope

et al. 2017

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“…This package has been used for simulations of different kinds of grazing incidence optics such as the conventional Wolter I shells like the Swift XRT, Silicon Pore Optics (SPO) and the Wolter I optics implemented using square pore optics for MIXS-T aboard the Bepicolombo satellite. [7][8][9][10] We assume an ideal detector with 100% detection efficiency at any energy in the model, and compare the effective area values obtained with Geant4 and the Q software. The effective area is defined as the whole area of the lens array times the ratio of the photons reaching at the detector to incident photons at the lenses.…”

Section: X-ray Tracing Simulations For Wxtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ray tracing simulations for the wide-field x-ray telescope of the Einstein Probe mission based on Geant4 and XRTG4

et al. 2014

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Einstein Probe (EP) is a proposed small scientific satellite dedicated to time-domain astrophysics working in the soft X-ray band. It will discover transients and monitor variable objects in 0.5-4 keV, for which it will employ a very large instantaneous field-of-view (60 o × 60 o ), along with moderate spatial resolution (FWHM ∼ 5 arcmin). Its wide-field imaging capability will be achieved by using established technology in novel lobster-eye optics. In this paper, we present Monte-Carlo simulations for the focusing capabilities of EP's Wide-field X-ray Telescope (WXT). The simulations are performed using Geant4 with an X-ray tracer which was developed by cosine (http://cosine.nl/) to trace X-rays. Our work is the first step toward building a comprehensive model with which the design of the X-ray optics and the ultimate sensitivity of the instrument can be optimized by simulating the X-ray tracing and radiation environment of the system, including the focal plane detector and the shielding at the same time.

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