An “ESA-affordable” Laue-lens

Abstract

With ESA’s INTEGRAL mission gamma-ray astronomy has advanced to the point where major scientific advances must be expected from detailed studies of the many new point sources. The interest in developing focusing telescopes operating in the soft gamma-ray regime up to 1 MeV is therefore mounting rapidly. Telescopes based on Laue diffraction of gamma-rays from crystals appear as one promising route, although the practical difficulties of realizing a large scale Laue lens are certainly not small. In this paper I have attempted to develop an optimized lens design considering the size and mass constraints of a specific medium size launch vehicle. The introduction of the lens mass as a primary design driver has some surprising effects for the choice of material for the crystals and new tradeoff considerations are introduced.