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

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-05-15, 15:11 authored by Donghua Zhao, Chen Zhang, Weimin Yuan, Shuangnan Zhang, Richard Willingale, Zhixing Ling
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.

History

Citation

Experimental Astronomy, 2017, in press

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING/Department of Physics and Astronomy

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Published in

Experimental Astronomy

Publisher

Springer Verlag

issn

0922-6435

eissn

1572-9508

Acceptance date

2017-03-20

Copyright date

2017

Available date

2018-03-31

Publisher version

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10686-017-9534-5

Notes

The file associated with this record is under embargo until 12 months after publication, in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. The full text may be available through the publisher links provided above.

Language

en

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