The European Photon Imaging Camera on XMM-Newton: The pn-CCD camera

Abstract

Abstract. The European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) consortium has provided the focal plane instruments for the three X-ray mirror systems on XMM-Newton. Two cameras with a reflecting grating spectrometer in the optical path are equipped with MOS type CCDs as focal plane detectors (Turner 2001), the telescope with the full photon flux operates the novel pn-CCD as an imaging X-ray spectrometer. The pn-CCD camera system was developed under the leadership of the Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik (MPE), Garching. The concept of the pn-CCD is described as well as the different operational modes of the camera system. The electrical, mechanical and thermal design of the focal plane and camera is briefly treated. The in-orbit performance is described in terms of energy resolution, quantum efficiency, time resolution, long term stability and charged particle background. Special emphasis is given to the radiation hardening of the devices and the measured and expected degradation due to radiation damage of ionizing particles in the first 9 months of in orbit operation.Key words. XMM-Newton -back illuminated pn-CCDs -radiation hardness -energy resolution -quantum efficiency -particle and flourescence background

A systematic analysis of the XMM-Newton background: IV

“…Indeed, large amounts of data collected by current X-ray observatories remain unexploited because of instrumental background issues. This is particular true for the data collected by the European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) instrument [1,2] on-board the ESA XMM-Newton mission [3] in 17 years of observations.…”

“…The knowledge of these components has been growing thanks to the many efforts involved in collecting suitable blank sky fields to be used as template background by the XMM-Newton users [4,5], the analysis of the XMM-Newton Guest Observer Facility leading to the XMMNewton Extended Source Analysis Software [6,7], the efforts of the XMMNewton SOC 1 and the contributions of various research teams, among them our in Milan has been particularly active on this topic [8,9,10]. A summary table of the EPIC instrumental background components is available at this link 2 .…”

Modeling the magnetospheric X‐ray emission from solar wind charge exchange with verification from XMM‐Newton observations

“…The European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) on board XMM-Newton, contains two metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) CCD cameras [Turner et al, 2001] and a single pn-CCD camera [Strüder et al, 2001], which provides a spectral resolution of ΔE E ∼17. We use observations from the EPIC-MOS cameras in this study and all mention of EPIC data refers to the MOS instruments.…”

An overview of the EXTraS project: Exploring the X-ray Transient and Variable Sky

“…This is the case for the European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) instrument onboard the ESA XMM-Newton X-ray observatory. EPIC consists of a pn [1] and of two MOS cameras [2]. Thanks to its unprecedented combination of large sensitivity to point sources, large field of view, good angular, spectral and temporal resolution, EPIC is the most powerful tool to study the variability of faint X-ray sources.…”

“…A catalogue of all the X-ray sources detected in EPIC pointed observations is periodically released by the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre consortium 1 . The most recent release, called 3XMM [3] is the richest source catalogue in the soft X-ray range ever compiled, including more than 565,000 detections of about 400,000 unique sources on > 877 square degrees of the sky (more than 70,000 sources have multiple-epoch detections due to the overlap of different observations).…”