A Narrow-band Approach

A Broad-band Approach

Paper (pdf) presented at the SPIE meeting in 2007. This approach could be used to measure X-ray polarization across the band from 0.2 to 0.8 keV.

Paper 2 (pdf) was presented at the SPIE meeting in 2008 and this paper was presented at the Rome X-ray Polarimetry meeting held in April, 2009. This approach could be implemented as a small mission or used on a large mission such as the International X-ray Observatory. A laboratory for demonstrating critical components of this design is also described. A small scale version of the laboratory work was developed in the summer of 2009.

Examples of targets for both instruments:

• BL Lac Objects with relativistic, magnetized jets which should be polarized up to 60 %
• Isolated pulsars such as PSR 0656+14, which have a strong magnetic field which will polarize the surface emission at the 20-50% level
• Quasars and Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) whose disks will show polarized emission due to electron scattering up to 12%

Updated: November 16, 2009