Abstract
The Cadmium–Zinc–Telluride Imager (CZTI) onboard AstroSat is designed for hard X-ray imaging and spectroscopy in the energy range of 20–100 keV. The CZT detectors are of 5-mm thickness and hence have good efficiency for Compton interactions beyond 100 keV. The polarisation analysis using CZTI relies on such Compton events and have been verified experimentally. The same Compton events can also be used to extend the spectroscopy up to 380 keV. Further, it has been observed that about 20% pixels of the CZTI detector plane have low gain, and they are excluded from the primary spectroscopy. If these pixels are included, then the spectroscopic capability of CZTI can be extended up to 500 keV and further up to 700 keV with a better gain calibration in the future. Here we explore the possibility of using the Compton events as well as the low gain pixels to extend the spectroscopic energy range of CZTI for ON-axis bright X-ray sources. We demonstrate this technique using Crab observations and explore its sensitivity.
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Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, Department of Space, Government of India. We acknowledge the ISRO Science Data Archive for AstroSat Mission, Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC) located at Bylalu for providing the required data for this publication and Payload Operation Center (POC) for CZTI located at Inter University Centre for Astronomy & Astrophysics (IUCAA) at Pune for providing the data reduction software.
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This article is part of the Special Issue on “AstroSat: Five Years in Orbit”.
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Kumar, A., Chattopadhyay, T., Vadawale, S.V. et al. Exploring sub-MeV sensitivity of AstroSat–CZTI for ON-axis bright sources. J Astrophys Astron 42, 67 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12036-021-09711-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12036-021-09711-9