Calibration of the Large Area X-ray Proportional Counter (LAXPC) instrument on-board AstroSat

Abstract

We present the calibration and background model for the Large Area X-ray Proportional Counter (LAXPC) detectors on-board AstroSat. LAXPC instrument has three nominally identical detectors to achieve large collecting area. These detectors are independent of each other and in the event analysis mode, they record the arrival time and energy of each photon that is detected. The detectors have a time-resolution of 10 $\mu$s and a dead-time of about 42 $\mu$s. This makes LAXPC ideal for timing studies. The energy resolution and peak channel to energy mapping were obtained from calibration on ground using radioactive sources coupled with GEANT4 simulations of the detectors. The response matrix was further refined from observations of the Crab X-ray source after launch. At around 20 keV the energy resolution of detector is about 10--15\%, while the combined effective area of the 3 detectors is about 6000 cm${}^2$.

Accepted for publication in ApJS

References in corpus (8)

• The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) Mission
• Calibration of the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer Proportional Counter Array
• Discriminating the Progenitor Type of Supernova Remnants with Iron K-Shell Emission
• The spectrum of the cosmic X-ray background observed by RTXE/PCA
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• AstroSat/LAXPC reveals the high energy variability of GRS 1915+105 in the chi class
• AstroSat/LAXPC observation of Cygnus X-1 in the hard state
• AstroSat/LAXPC detection of milli-second phenomena in 4U 1728-34

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