The X-/Gamma-ray camera ECLAIRs for the Gammay-ray burst mission SVOM

Abstract

We present ECLAIRs, the Gamma-ray burst (GRB) trigger camera to fly on-board the Chinese-French mission SVOM. ECLAIRs is a wide-field ($\sim 2$\,sr) coded mask camera with a mask transparency of 40\% and a 1024 ${\mathrm{cm}}^2$ detection plane coupled to a data processing unit, so-called UGTS, which is in charge of locating GRBs in near real time thanks to image and rate triggers. We present the instrument science requirements and how the design of ECLAIRs has been optimized to increase its sensitivity to high-redshift GRBs and low-luminosity GRBs in the local Universe, by having a low-energy threshold of 4 keV. The total spectral coverage ranges from 4 to 150 keV. ECLAIRs is expected to detect $\sim 200$ GRBs of all types during the nominal 3 year mission lifetime. To reach a 4 keV low-energy threshold, the ECLAIRs detection plane is paved with 6400 $4\times 4{\mathrm{mm}}^2$ and 1 mm-thick Schottky CdTe detectors. The detectors are grouped by 32, in 8x4 matrices read by a low-noise ASIC, forming elementary modules called XRDPIX. In this paper, we also present our current efforts to investigate the performance of these modules with their front-end electronics when illuminated by charged particles and/or photons using radioactive sources. All measurements are made in different instrument configurations in vacuum and with a nominal in-flight detector temperature of $-20^{\circ }$C. This work will enable us to choose the in-flight configuration that will make the best compromise between the science performance and the in-flight operability of ECLAIRs. We will show some highlights of this work.

15 pages, 12 figures, Proceeding SPIE - Montreal 2014

References in corpus (3)

• The ultra-long Gamma-Ray Burst 111209A: the collapse of a blue supergiant?
• Illuminating Massive Black Holes With White Dwarfs: Orbital Dynamics and High Energy Transients from Tidal Interactions
• Afterglows after Swift

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Perspectives on Gamma-Ray Burst Physics and Cosmology with Next Generation Facilities
• Late-time accretion in neutron star mergers: implications for short gamma-ray bursts and kilonovae
• Ultra-Long Gamma-Ray Bursts detection with SVOM/ECLAIRs
• Catalog of outbursts of neutron star LMXBs
• Distinguishing Time Clustering of Astrophysical Bursts
• Target Detection Framework for Lobster Eye X-Ray Telescopes with Machine Learning Algorithms
• Simulations of the SVOM/ECLAIRs Dynamic Background: A fast, accurate and general approach for wide-field hard X-ray instruments
• Are binary black hole mergers and long gamma-ray bursts drawn from the same black hole population?
• Detection of short high-energy transients in the localuniverse with SVOM/ECLAIRs
• GRB 241105A: A test case for GRB classification and rapid r-process nucleosynthesis channels
• Analysis methods to localize and characterize X-ray sources with the Micro-channel X-ray Telescope on board the SVOM satellite
• A LOFAR prompt search for radio emission accompanying X-ray flares in GRB 210112A
• The SVOM/ECLAIRs image trigger with wavelet-based background correction optimised with a one-year simulation of observations
• Accessing the Host Galaxies of Long Gamma-Ray Bursts with Next-Generation Telescopes
• Design and preliminary performance study of the broad-band spectrometer detector for POLAR-2