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Register a new userLong-term trends in radiation damage of Chandra X-ray CCDs
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Soon after launch, the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS), one of the focal plane instruments on the Chandra X-ray Observatory, suffered radiation damage from exposure to soft protons during passages through the Earths radiation belts. Current operations require ACIS to be protected during radiation belt passages to prevent this type of damage, but there remains a much slower and more gradual increase. We present the history of ACIS charge transfer inefficiency (CTI), and other measures of radiation damage, from January 2000 through June 2005. The rate of CTI increase is low, of order 1e-6 per year, with no indication of step-function increases due to specific solar events. Based on the time history and CCD location of the CTI increase, we speculate on the nature of the damaging particles.
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Aging phenomena constitute one of the most complex and serious potential problems which could limit, or severely impair, the use of gaseous detectors in unprecedented harsh radiation environments. Long-term operation in high-intensity experiments of the LHC-era not only demands extraordinary radiation hardness of construction materials and gas mixtures but also very specific and appropriate assembly procedures and quality checks during detector construction and testing. Recent experimental data from hadron beams is discussed. It is shown that the initial stage of radiation tests, usually performed under isolated laboratory conditions, may not offer the full information needed to extrapolate to the long-term performance of real and full-size detectors at high energy physics facilities. Major factors, closely related to the capability of operating at large localized ionization densities, and which could lead to operation instabilities and subsequent aging phenomena in gaseous detectors, are summarized. Finally, an overview of aging experience with state-of-the-art gas detectors in experiments with low- and high-intensity radiation environments is given with a goal of providing a set of rules, along with some caveat, for the construction and operation of gaseous detectors in high luminosity experiments.
The Gaia satellite is a high-precision astrometry, photometry and spectroscopic ESA cornerstone mission, currently scheduled for launch in late 2011. Its primary science drivers are the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will achieve its scientific requirements with detailed calibration and correction for radiation damage. Microscopic models of Gaias CCDs are being developed to simulate the charge trapping effect of radiation damage, which causes charge transfer inefficiency. The key to calculating the probability of a photoelectron being captured by a trap is the 3D electron density within each CCD pixel. However, this has not been physically modelled for Gaia CCD pixels. In this paper, the first of a series, we motivate the need for such specialised 3D device modelling and outline how its future results will fit into Gaias overall radiation calibration strategy.
Soon after launch, the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS), one of the focal plane instruments on the Chandra X-ray Observatory, suffered radiation damage from exposure to soft protons during passages through the Earths radiation belts. The primary effect of the damage was to increase the charge transfer inefficiency (CTI) of the eight front illuminated CCDs by more than two orders of magnitude. The ACIS instrument team is continuing to study the properties of the damage with an emphasis on developing techniques to mitigate CTI and spectral resolution degradation. We present the initial temperature dependence of ACIS CTI from -120 to -60 degrees Celsius and the current temperature dependence after more than six years of continuing slow radiation damage. We use the change of shape of the temperature dependence to speculate on the nature of the damaging particles.
RT Cru belongs to the rare class of hard X-ray emitting symbiotics, whose origin is not yet fully understood. In this work, we have conducted a detailed spectroscopic analysis of X-ray emission from RT Cru based on observations taken by the Chandra Observatory using the Low Energy Transmission Grating (LETG) on the High-Resolution Camera Spectrometer (HRC-S) in 2015 and the High Energy Transmission Grating (HETG) on the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer S-array (ACIS-S) in 2005. Our thermal plasma modeling of the time-averaged HRC-S/LETG spectrum suggests a mean temperature of $kT sim 1.3$ keV, whereas $kT sim 9.6$ keV according to the time-averaged ACIS-S/HETG. The soft thermal plasma emission component ($sim1.3$ keV) found in the HRC-S is heavily obscured by dense materials ($> 5 times 10^{23}$ cm$^{-2}$). The aperiodic variability seen in its light curves could be due to changes in either absorbing material covering the hard X-ray source or intrinsic emission mechanism in the inner layers of the accretion disk. To understand the variability, we extracted the spectra in the low/hard and high/soft spectral states, which indicated higher plasma temperatures in the low/hard states of both the ACIS-S and HRC-S. The source also has a fluorescent iron emission line at 6.4 keV, likely emitted from reflection off an accretion disk or dense absorber, which was twice as bright in the HRC-S epoch compared to the ACIS-S. The soft thermal component identified in the HRC-S might be an indication of a jet that deserves further evaluations using high-resolution imaging observations.
We present an analysis of long term X-ray monitoring observations of Circinus X-1 (Cir X-1) made with four different instruments: Vela 5B, Ariel V ASM, Ginga ASM, and RXTE ASM, over the course of more than 30 years. We use Lomb-Scargle periodograms to search for the ~16.5 day orbital period of Cir X-1 in each of these data sets and from this derive a new orbital ephemeris based solely on X-ray measurements, which we compare to the previous ephemerides obtained from radio observations. We also use the Phase Dispersion Minimization (PDM) technique, as well as FFT analysis, to verify the periods obtained from periodograms. we obtain dynamic periodograms (both Lomb-Scargle and PDM) of Cir X-1 during the RXTE era, showing the period evolution of Cir X-1, and also displaying some unexplained discrete jumps in the location of the peak power.
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