Abstract We have developed a new kind of phoswich counters that will be capable of detecting low flux hard X-rays/gamma-rays from astronomical objects. The new phoswich counter consists of a small inorganic scintillator with a fast decay time (the detection part) glued to the interior bottom surface of a rectangular well-shaped block of another inorganic scintillator with a slow decay time (the shielding part). Here, the well-shaped shielding part acts as an active collimator as well as an active shield. We have built a detector system consisting of 64 such phoswich counters: newly developed scintillator (GSO) is used for the detection part and CsI(Tl) is used for the shielding part. The total geometrical area of the 64 detection parts is about 740cm2 and its 3σ sensitivity is expected to reach below 10−5cm−2s−1keV−1 up to 700keV. With several improvements such detectors will be able to detect hard X-rays/gamma-rays at a flux level around 10−6cm−2s−1keV−1 upto 2 MeV.
Detector to study low-flux hard X-ray/gamma-ray sources
Advances in Space Research ; 13 , 2 ; 165-168
1992-01-01
4 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English