Advanced Weights for IXPE Polarization Analysis
arXiv:2509.07981 · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ae0f95
Abstract
As the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) measures increasingly faint sources, the need for precise polarimetry extraction becomes paramount. In addition to previously described neural-net (NN) weights, we introduce here point-spread function weights and particle background weights, which can be critical for faint sources. In some cases these can be augmented by time/phase and energy weights. We provide a publicly available analysis tool to incorporate these new weights, validate our method on simulated data, and test it on archival IXPE observations. Together these weights decrease the area of the polarization uncertainty contour by a factor of two compared to baseline IXPE analysis and will be essential for background-limited IXPE observations.
arXiv comment8+3 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ
References in corpus (15)
- Analyzing the Data from X-ray Polarimeters with Stokes Parameters
- ixpeobssim: a Simulation and Analysis Framework for the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer
- Design, Construction, and Test of the Gas Pixel Detectors for the IXPE Mission
- Handling Background in IXPE polarimetric data
- Spatial Variation of the X-ray spectrum of the Crab Nebula
- GRB 221009A: Discovery of an Exceptionally Rare Nearby and Energetic Gamma-Ray Burst
- A weighted analysis to improve the X-ray polarization sensitivity of IXPE
- Chandra Phase-Resolved Spectroscopy of the Crab Pulsar
- The IXPE view of GRB 221009A
- Deep Ensemble Analysis for Imaging X-ray Polarimetry
- Unbinned Likelihood Analysis for X-ray Polarization
- Polarisation Leakage due to Errors in Track Reconstruction in Gas Pixel Detectors
- Multiband Weighting of X-ray Polarization Data
- Polarization Leakage and the IXPE PSF
- Mitigating Polarization Leakage in Gas Pixel Detectors through Hybrid Machine Learning and Analytic Event Reconstruction