The MEGA Advanced Compton Telescope Project

Abstract

The goal of the Medium Energy Gamma-ray Astronomy (MEGA) telescope is to improve sensitivity at medium gamma-ray energies (0.4-50 MeV) by at least an order of magnitude over that of COMPTEL. This will be achieved with a new compact design that allows for a very wide field of view, permitting a sensitive all-sky survey and the monitoring of transient and variable sources. The key science objectives for MEGA include the investigation of cosmic high-energy particle accelerators, studies of nucleosynthesis sites using gamma-ray lines, and determination of the large-scale structure of galactic and cosmic diffuse background emission. MEGA records and images gamma-ray events by completely tracking both Compton and pair creation interactions in a tracker of double-sided silicon strip detectors and a calorimeter of CsI crystals able to resolve in three dimensions. We present initial laboratory calibration results from a small prototype MEGA telescope.

7 pages LaTeX, 5 figures, to appear in New Astronomy Reviews (Proceedings of the Ringberg Workshop "Astronomy with Radioactivities III")

References in corpus (2)

• Event reconstruction in high resolution Compton telescopes
• Spectroscopy and Imaging Performance of the Liquid Xenon Gamma-Ray Imaging Telescope (LXeGRIT)

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Polarisation studies of the prompt gamma-ray emission from GRB 041219a using the Spectrometer aboard INTEGRAL
• The Concordance Cosmic Star Formation Rate: Implications from and for the Supernova Neutrino and Gamma Ray Backgrounds
• Performance of a Low Noise Front-end ASIC for Si/CdTe Detectors in Compton Gamma-ray Telescope
• Observation of Diffuse Cosmic and Atmospheric Gamma Rays at Balloon Altitudes with an Electron-tracking Compton Camera
• The Star-Forming Galaxy Contribution to the Cosmic MeV and GeV Gamma-Ray Background
• Detection and Imaging of the Crab Nebula with the Nuclear Compton Telescope
• Performance of the TPC with Micro Pixel Chamber Readout: micro-TPC
• Angular Correlations of the MeV Cosmic Gamma Ray Background
• Design and Performance of the Soft Gamma-ray Detector for the NeXT mission
• The first demonstration of the concept of "narrow-FOV Si/CdTe semiconductor Compton camera"
• Imaging Polarimeter for a Sub-MeV Gamma-Ray All-Sky Survey using an Electron-Tracking Compton Camera
• Gamma Ray polarimetry; a new window for the non-thermal Universe
• Compton Telescopes for Gamma-ray Astrophysics
• COCOA: a compact Compton camera for astrophysical observation of MeV-scale gamma rays