Hard x-ray polarimetry with a thick CdTe position sensitive spectrometer

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Abstract
Even though it is recognized that the study of polarization from cosmic high-energy sources can give very important information about the nature of the emission mechanism, to date very few measurements have been attempted. For several years we have proposed the use of a thick CdTe array as a position sensitive spectrometer for hard X- and soft gamma-ray astronomy, a design which is also efficient for use as a polarimeter at energies above approximately 100 keV. Herein we describe the preliminary results of our study of a polarimeter based on 4096 CdTe microcrystals that we would like to develop for a high altitude balloon experiment. We present the telescope concept with a description of each subsystem together with some results on activities devoted to the optimization of the CdTe detector units' response. Furthermore we give an evaluation of the telescope performance in terms of achievable spectroscopic and polarimetric performance. In particular we will show the results of Monte Carlo simulations developed to evaluate the efficiency of our detector as a hard X ray polarimeter.

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