Imaging Performance of FIGARO-IV, A Large Area γ-Ray Telescope Above 100 MeV.

Abstract

We are developing a new telescope, named FIGARO-IV, for γ-ray astronomy above 100 MeV, in which the electron-positron pairs, produced by photons in lead converters, are tracked in several independent planes of Limited Streamer Tubes (LST). Because of its large sensitive area and good angular resolution, this telescope is well suitable, and competitive with respect to satellite-based detectors as EGRET, to localise discrete γ-ray sources in a relatively short observation time, to detect high-energy γ-ray bursts and to investigate both periodic and random time variability on -ray sources.

In this contribution we present the results on the imaging performance, evaluated by means of many numerical simulations based on the GEANT code, for a 16m² telescope, as FIGARO-IV that we project to fly by means of a stratospheric balloon.