Coded Aperture Imaging in High-Energy Astrophysics

Abstract

Hard X-ray and low-energy gamma-ray coded-aperture imaging instruments have been highly successful as high-energy surveyors and transient-source discoverers and trackers over the past decades. Albeit having relatively low sensitivity as compared to focussing instruments, coded-aperture telescopes still represent a very good choice for simultaneous, high cadence spectral measurements of individual point sources in large source fields. Here I present a review of the fundamentals of coded-aperture imaging instruments in high-energy astrophysics. Emphasis is on fundamental aspects of the technique, coded-mask instrument characteristics, and properties of the reconstructed images.

35 pages, accepted by PASP as an invited review

References in corpus (4)

• The enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarimetry mission - eXTP
• SuperAGILE: the hard X-ray Imager for the AGILE space mission
• Observatory science with eXTP
• The sensitivity of coded mask telescopes

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Quantitative Comparison of Planar Coded Aperture Imaging Reconstruction Methods
• Harvesting BAT-GUANO with NITRATES (Non-Imaging Transient Reconstruction And TEmporal Search): Detecting and localizing the faintest GRBs with a likelihood framework
• Near-field coded-mask technique and its potential for proton therapy monitoring
• LECX: a cubesat experiment to detect and localize cosmic explosions in hard X rays