0000000000390550
AUTHOR
Francois Lebrun
The Gamma Cube: a new way to explore the gamma-ray sky
International audience; We propose a new concept to allow the tracking of electrons in a gamma-ray telescope operating in the 5–100 MeV band. The idea of this experiment is to image the ionizing tracks that charged particles produce in a scintillator. It is a pair creation telescope at high energy and a Compton telescope with electron tracking at low energy. The telescope features a large scintillator transparent to the scintillation light, an ad-hoc optical system and a high resolution and highly sensitive imager. The performance perspectives and the advantages of such a system are outstanding but the technical difficulties are serious. A few years of research and development within the sc…
IBIS: The Imager on-board INTEGRAL
The IBIS telescope is the high angular resolution gamma-ray imager on-board the INTEGRAL Observatory, successfully launched from Baikonur (Kazakhstan) the 17th of October 2002. This medium size ESA project, planned for a 2 year mission with possible extension to 5, is devoted to the observation of the gamma-ray sky in the energy range from 3 keV to 10 MeV (Winkler 2001). The IBIS imaging system is based on two independent solid state detector arrays optimised for low ( 15-1000 keV) and high ( 0.175-10.0 MeV) energies surrounded by an active VETO System. This high efficiency shield is essential to minimise the background induced by high energy particles in the highly excentric out of van All…
The Large Observatory For x-ray Timing
The Large Observatory For x-ray Timing (LOFT) was studied within ESA M3 Cosmic Vision framework and participated in the final down-selection for a launch slot in 2022-2024. Thanks to the unprecedented combination of effective area and spectral resolution of its main instrument, LOFT will study the behaviour of matter under extreme conditions, such as the strong gravitational field in the innermost regions of accretion flows close to black holes and neutron stars, and the supra-nuclear densities in the interior of neutron stars. The science payload is based on a Large Area Detector (LAD, 10 m 2 effective area, 2-30 keV, 240 eV spectral resolution, 1 deg collimated field of view) and a WideFi…