High resolution gamma-ray telescope using a coded aperture mask and drift chamber

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Abstract
A method is described for improving the angular resolution of a high energy γ-ray telescope. It is shown that a coded aperture mask combined with a drift chamber pair detector can achieve a ∼ 10 arcmin point spread function thereby resolving the structure of extended sources on a 10 arcmin scale and locating individual point sources to within a few arcmin, an improvement by more than an order of magnitude over existing instruments. A two stage data analysis, in which the γ-ray direction is initially determined from the pair direction and then the mask decoding is performed over this restricted field of view, results in a significant reduction in the observation time required. The high spatial resolution of the drift chamber is an essential element of the system.

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