Performance of the gas pixel detector to a continuum and highly polarized X-ray beam

摘要

We report on the first measure of the polarization of a laboratory source with a continuum energy spectrum, which simulates the effect of a real astrophysical source, carried out with a prototype of the Gas Pixel Detector (GPD). This detector is an X-ray polarimeter exploiting the photoelectric effect both to measure the polarization and to obtain the image of astrophysical sources. The gas pixel detector will be the focal plane detector on board the IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) mission selected by NASA in the framework of the Explorer program for a launch in 2021.