On understanding the figures of merit for detection and measurement of x-ray polarization

By M. Weisskopf, R. Elsner, S. O’Dell. Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2010

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The prospects for accomplishing X-ray polarization measurements appear to have grown in recent years after a more than 35-year hiatus. Unfortunately, this long hiatus has brought with it some confusion over the statistical uncertainties associated with polarization measurements of astronomical sources. The heart of this confusion stems from a misunderstanding (or potential misunderstanding) of a standard figure of merit-the minimum detectable polarization (MDP)-that one of us introduced many years ago. We review the relevant statistics, and quantify the differences between the MDP and the uncertainty of an actual polarization measurement. We discuss the implications for future missions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0bd369daab64af0cdbc3416cff144eef1ec374f

Citations in the corpus

• XIPE: the x-ray imaging polarimetry explorer (2006, unknown): “where B is the background counting rate (negligible for focal plane experiments as in the case of a GPD at the focus of an X-ray optics), T is the observing time, S is the source counting rate and μ is the modulation factor.(9) As can be seen in table 1 the total number of counts for reaching an MDP”