Monte Carlo Simulator and Ancillary Response Generator of Suzaku XRT/XIS System for Spatially Extended Source Analysis

By Y. Ishisaki, Y. Maeda, R. Fujimoto, M. Ozaki, K. Ebisawa, Tadayuki Takahashi, Y. Ueda, Y. Ogasaka, A. Ptak, K. Mukai and 24 more. 2006

355 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We have developed a framework for the Monte-Carlo simulation of the X-Ray Telescopes (XRT) and the X-ray Imaging Spectrometers (XIS) onboard Suzaku, mainly for the scientific analysis of spatially and spectroscopically complex celestial sources. A photon-by-photon instrumental simulator is built on the ANL platform, which has been successfully used in ASCA data analysis. The simulator has a modular structure, in which the XRT simulation is based on a ray-tracing library, while the XIS simulation utilizes a spectral "Redistribution Matrix File" (RMF), generated separately by other tools. Instrumental characteristics and calibration results, e.g., XRT geometry, reflectivity, mutual alignments, thermal shield transmission, build-up of the contamination on the XIS optical blocking filters (OBF), are incorporated as completely as possible. Most of this information is available in the form of the FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) files in the standard calibration database (CALDB). This simulator can also be utilized to generate an "Ancillary Response File" (ARF), which describes the XRT response and the amount of OBF contamination. The ARF is dependent on the spatial distribution of the celestial target and the photon accumulation region on the detector, as well as observing conditions such as the observation date and satellite attitude. We describe principles of the simulator and the ARF generator, and demonstrate their performance in comparison with in-flight data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51114266590c0408f60361ba813993ce14be1463

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. M. Alexander
2. E. Treister
3. Kevin Schawinski
4. C. Ricci
5. Y. Ueda
6. B. Trakhtenbrot
7. K. Pounds
8. F. E. Bauer

In Computational Mechanics

1. F. E. Bauer
2. Y. Ueda
3. C. Ricci
4. Kevin Schawinski
5. Luis C. Ho

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. E. Treister
2. Luis C. Ho
3. K. Pounds
4. Kevin Schawinski
5. C. Ricci
6. F. E. Bauer
7. Poshak Gandhi
8. R. Petre

Citations in the corpus

• Reproducibility of Non-X-ray Background for the X-ray Imaging Spectrometer aboard Suzaku (2008, background): “First, since the intensity of the NXB is not uniform over the CCD chip (Yamaguchi et al. 2006), the NXB spectrum needs to be extracted from the same region as the source spectrum in detector (DET) coordinates (Ishisaki et al. 2007).”
• Study of Nonthermal Emission from SNR RX J1713.7–3946 with Suzaku (2008, methodology): “After subtracting the background, the vignetting effects of the XRTs were corrected by means of the simulation program calledxissim (Ishisaki et al. 2007).”
• FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE VIEW OF THE CORE OF THE RADIO GALAXY CENTAURUS A (2010, neutral): “The XIS response matrices290 are created with xisrmfgen and xissimarfgen (Ishisaki et al. 2007).”
• Energy spectra of the soft X-ray diffuse emission in fourteen fields observed with Suzaku (2009, methodology): “In order to perform spectral fitting, we generated an efficiency file (arf file) for a spatially uniform emission, using the xissimarfgen software version 2008- 04-05 (Ishisaki et al. 2007), assuming a 20′-radius flat field as the input emission of the generator.”
• On why the iron K-shell absorption in AGN is not a signature of the local warm/hot intergalactic medium (2008, methodology): “XIS response files (rmfs) and ancillary response files (arfs) were g nerated using theXISRMFGEN and XISSIMARFGEN scripts including correction for the hydrocarbon contamination on the optical blocking filter (Ishisaki et al. 2007).”
• BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey. V. X-Ray Properties of the Swift/BAT 70-month AGN Catalog (2017, methodology): “We generated the ancillary response matrices (ARFs) and the detector response matrices (RMFs) using the xisrmfgen and xissimarfgen tasks (Ishisaki et al. 2007), respectively.”