分类: 物理学 >> 核物理学 分类: 天文学 >> 天文仪器与技术 分类: 材料科学 >> 材料科学(综合) 提交时间: 2023-12-15
摘要: The GECAM series of satellites utilizes LaBr3(Ce), LaBr3(Ce,Sr), and NaI(Tl) crystals as sensitive materials for gamma-ray detectors (GRDs). To investigate the non-linearity in the detection of low-energy gamma rays and address the errors in the calibration of the E-C relationship, comprehensive tests and comparative studies of the three aforementioned crystals were conducted using Compton electrons, radioactive sources, and monoenergetic X-rays. The non-linearity test results of the Compton electrons and X-rays demonstrated substantial differences, with all three crystals presenting a higher non-linearity for X/-rays than for Compton electrons. Despite the LaBr3(Ce) and LaBr3(Ce,Sr) crystals having higher absolute light yields, they exhibited a noticeable non-linear decrease in the light yield, especially at energies below 400 keV. The NaI(Tl) crystal demonstrated an excess light output in the 6200 keV range, reaching a maximum excess of 9.2% at 30 keV in the X-ray testing and up to 15.5% at 14 keV during Compton electron testing, indicating a significant advantage in the detection of low-energy gamma rays. Furthermore, we explored the underlying causes of the observed non-linearity in these crystals. This study not only elucidates the detector responses of GECAM, but also initiates a comprehensive investigation of the non-linearity of domestically produced lanthanum bromide and sodium iodide crystals.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: To research the burst phenomenon of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in depth, it is necessary to explore an effective and accurate identification of GRBs. Onboard blind search, ground blind search, and target search method are popular methods in identifying GRBs. However, they undeniably miss GRBs due to the influence of threshold, especially for sub-threshold triggers. We present a new approach to distinguish GRB by using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to classify count maps that contain bursting information in more dimensions. For comparison, we design three supervised CNN models with different structures. Thirteen years Time-Tagged Event (TTE) format data from Fermi/GBM is employed to construct useful data sets and to train, validate and test these models. We find an optimal model, i.e. the ResNet-CBAM model trained on the 64 ms data set, which contains residual and attention mechanism modules. We track this deep learning model through two visualization analysis methods separately, Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) and T-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) method, and find it focused on the main features of GRBs. By applying it on one-year data, about 96% of GRBs in the Fermi burst catalog were distinguished accurately, six out of ten GRBs of sub-threshold triggers were identified correctly, and meaningfully thousands of new candidates were obtained and listed according to their SNR information. Our study implies that the deep learning method could distinguish GRBs from background-like maps effectively and reliably. In the future, it can be implemented into real-time analysis pipelines to reduce manual inspection and improve accuracy, enabling follow-up observations with multi-band telescopes.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: Fast and reliable localization of high-energy transients is crucial for characterizing the burst properties and guiding the follow-up observations. Localization based on the relative counts of different detectors has been widely used for all-sky gamma-ray monitors. There are two major methods for this counts distribution localization: $\chi^{2}$ minimization method and the Bayesian method. Here we propose a modified Bayesian method that could take advantage of both the accuracy of the Bayesian method and the simplicity of the $\chi^{2}$ method. With comprehensive simulations, we find that our Bayesian method with Poisson likelihood is generally more applicable for various bursts than $\chi^{2}$ method, especially for weak bursts. We further proposed a location-spectrum iteration approach based on the Bayesian inference, which could alleviate the problems caused by the spectral difference between the burst and location templates. Our method is very suitable for scenarios with limited computation resources or time-sensitive applications, such as in-flight localization software, and low-latency localization for rapid follow-up observations.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: As a new member of GECAM mission, GECAM-C (also named High Energy Burst Searcher, HEBS) was launched onboard the SATech-01 satellite on July 27th, 2022, which is capable to monitor gamma-ray transients from $\sim$ 6 keV to 6 MeV. As the main detector, there are 12 gamma-ray detectors (GRDs) equipped for GECAM-C. In order to verify the GECAM-C GRD detector performance and to validate the Monte Carlo simulations of detector response, comprehensive on-ground calibration experiments have been performed using X-ray beam and radioactive sources, including Energy-Channel relation, energy resolution, detection efficiency, SiPM voltage-gain relation and the non-uniformity of positional response. In this paper, the detailed calibration campaigns and data analysis results for GECAM-C GRDs are presented, demonstrating the excellent performance of GECAM-C GRD detectors.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: As a new member of GECAM mission, GECAM-C (also named High Energy Burst Searcher, HEBS) was launched onboard the SATech-01 satellite on July 27th, 2022, which is capable to monitor gamma-ray transients from $\sim$ 6 keV to 6 MeV. As the main detector, there are 12 gamma-ray detectors (GRDs) equipped for GECAM-C. In order to verify the GECAM-C GRD detector performance and to validate the Monte Carlo simulations of detector response, comprehensive on-ground calibration experiments have been performed using X-ray beam and radioactive sources, including Energy-Channel relation, energy resolution, detection efficiency, SiPM voltage-gain relation and the non-uniformity of positional response. In this paper, the detailed calibration campaigns and data analysis results for GECAM-C GRDs are presented, demonstrating the excellent performance of GECAM-C GRD detectors.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: As a new member of GECAM mission, the GECAM-C (also called High Energy Burst Searcher, HEBS) is a gamma-ray all-sky monitor onboard SATech-01 satellite, which was launched on July 27th, 2022 to detect gamma-ray transients from 6 keV to 6 MeV, such as Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), high energy counterpart of Gravitational Waves (GWs) and Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), and Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters (SGRs). Together with GECAM-A and GECAM-B launched in December 2020, GECAM-C will greatly improve the monitoring coverage, localization, as well as temporal and spectral measurements of gamma-ray transients. GECAM-C employs 12 SiPM-based Gamma-Ray Detectors (GRDs) to detect gamma-ray transients . In this paper, we firstly give a brief description of the design of GECAM-C GRDs, and then focus on the on-ground tests and in-flight performance of GRDs. We also did the comparison study of the SiPM in-flight performance between GECAM-C and GECAM-B. The results show GECAM-C GRD works as expected and is ready to make scientific observations.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: The Earth occultation technique has broad applications in both astronomy and atmospheric density measurements. We construct the background model during the occultation of the Crab Nebula observed by the Insight-Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (Insight-HXMT) at energies between 6 keV and 100 keV. We propose a Bayesian atmospheric density retrieval method based on the Earth occultation technique, combining Poisson and Gaussian statistics. By modeling the atmospheric attenuation of X-ray photons during the occultation, we simultaneously retrieved the neutral densities of the atmosphere at different altitude ranges. Our method considers the correlation of densities between neighboring atmospheric layers and reduces the potential systematic bias to which previous work may be subject. Previous analyses based on light curve fitting or spectral fitting also lost some spectral or temporal information of the data. In contrast to previous work, the occultation data observed by the three telescopes onboard Insight-HXMT is fully used in our analysis, further reducing the statistical error in density retrieval. We apply our method to cross-check the (semi-)empirical atmospheric models, using 115 sets of occultation data of the Crab Nebula observed by Insight-HXMT. We find that the retrieved neutral density is ~10%, ~20%, and ~25% less than the values of the widely used atmospheric model NRLMSISE-00, in the altitude range of 55--80 km, 80--90 km, and 90--100 km, respectively. We also show that the newly released atmospheric model NRLMSIS 2.0 is generally consistent with our density measurements.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: The gamma-ray detectors (GRDs) of GECAM-C onborad SATech-01 satellite is designed to monitor gamma-ray transients all over the sky from 6 keV to 6 MeV. The energy response matrix is the key to do spectral measurements of bursts, which is usually generated from GEANT4 simulation and partially verified by the ground calibration. In this work, energy response matrix of GECAM-C GRD is cross-calibrated with Fermi/GBM and Swift/BAT using a sample of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) and Soft Gamma-Ray Repeaters (SGRs). The calibration results show there is a good agreement between GECAM-C and other reasonably well calibrated instrument (i.e. Fermi/GBM and Swift/BAT). We also find that different GRD detectors of GECAM-C also show consistency with each other. All these results indicate that GECAM-C GRD can provide reliable spectral measurements.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: Searching for X-ray and gamma-ray bursts, including Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters (SGRs) and high energy transients associated with Gravitational wave (GW) events or Fast radio bursts (FRBs), is of great importance in the multi-messenger and multi-wavelength era. Although a coherent search based on the likelihood ratio and Gaussian statistics has been established and utilized in many studies, this Gaussian-based method could be problematic for weak and short bursts which usually have very few counts. To deal with all bursts including weak ones, here we propose the coherent search in Poisson statistics. We studied the difference between Poisson-based and Gaussian-based search methods by Monte Carlo simulations, and find that the Poisson-based search method has advantages compared to the Gaussian case especially for weak bursts. Our results show that, for very weak bursts with very low number of counts, the Poisson-based search can provide higher significance than the Gaussian-based search, and its likelihood ratio (for background fluctuation) still generally follows the chi2 distribution, making the significance estimation of searched bursts very convenient. Thus, we suggest that the coherent search based on Poisson likelihood ratio is more appropriate in the search for generic transients including very weak ones.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: As a new member of GECAM mission, the GECAM-C (also called High Energy Burst Searcher, HEBS) is a gamma-ray all-sky monitor onboard SATech-01 satellite, which was launched on July 27th, 2022 to detect gamma-ray transients from 6 keV to 6 MeV, such as Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), high energy counterpart of Gravitational Waves (GWs) and Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), and Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters (SGRs). Together with GECAM-A and GECAM-B launched in December 2020, GECAM-C will greatly improve the monitoring coverage, localization, as well as temporal and spectral measurements of gamma-ray transients. GECAM-C employs 12 SiPM-based Gamma-Ray Detectors (GRDs) to detect gamma-ray transients . In this paper, we firstly give a brief description of the design of GECAM-C GRDs, and then focus on the on-ground tests and in-flight performance of GRDs. We also did the comparison study of the SiPM in-flight performance between GECAM-C and GECAM-B. The results show GECAM-C GRD works as expected and is ready to make scientific observations.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: Realtime trigger and localization of bursts are the key functions of GECAM, which is an all-sky gamma-ray monitor launched in Dec 10, 2020. We developed a multifunctional trigger and localization software operating on the CPU of the GECAM electronic box (EBOX). This onboard software has the following features: high trigger efficiency for real celestial bursts with a suppression of false triggers caused by charged particle bursts and background fluctuation, dedicated localization algorithm optimized for short and long bursts respetively, short time latency of the trigger information which is downlinked throught the BeiDou satellite navigation System (BDS). This paper presents the detailed design and deveopment of this trigger and localization software system of GECAM, including the main functions, general design, workflow and algorithms, as well as the verification and demonstration of this software, including the on-ground trigger tests with simulated gamma-ray bursts made by a dedicated X-ray tube and the in-flight performance to real gamma-ray bursts and magnetar bursts.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: The gamma-ray detectors (GRDs) of GECAM-C onborad SATech-01 satellite is designed to monitor gamma-ray transients all over the sky from 6 keV to 6 MeV. The energy response matrix is the key to do spectral measurements of bursts, which is usually generated from GEANT4 simulation and partially verified by the ground calibration. In this work, energy response matrix of GECAM-C GRD is cross-calibrated with Fermi/GBM and Swift/BAT using a sample of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) and Soft Gamma-Ray Repeaters (SGRs). The calibration results show there is a good agreement between GECAM-C and other reasonably well calibrated instrument (i.e. Fermi/GBM and Swift/BAT). We also find that different GRD detectors of GECAM-C also show consistency with each other. All these results indicate that GECAM-C GRD can provide reliable spectral measurements.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: To research the burst phenomenon of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in depth, it is necessary to explore an effective and accurate identification of GRBs. Onboard blind search, ground blind search, and target search method are popular methods in identifying GRBs. However, they undeniably miss GRBs due to the influence of threshold, especially for sub-threshold triggers. We present a new approach to distinguish GRB by using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to classify count maps that contain bursting information in more dimensions. For comparison, we design three supervised CNN models with different structures. Thirteen years Time-Tagged Event (TTE) format data from Fermi/GBM is employed to construct useful data sets and to train, validate and test these models. We find an optimal model, i.e. the ResNet-CBAM model trained on the 64 ms data set, which contains residual and attention mechanism modules. We track this deep learning model through two visualization analysis methods separately, Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) and T-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) method, and find it focused on the main features of GRBs. By applying it on one-year data, about 96% of GRBs in the Fermi burst catalog were distinguished accurately, six out of ten GRBs of sub-threshold triggers were identified correctly, and meaningfully thousands of new candidates were obtained and listed according to their SNR information. Our study implies that the deep learning method could distinguish GRBs from background-like maps effectively and reliably. In the future, it can be implemented into real-time analysis pipelines to reduce manual inspection and improve accuracy, enabling follow-up observations with multi-band telescopes.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: Gravitational wave high-energy Electromagnetic Counterpart All-sky Monitor (GECAM) is a pair of microsatellites (i.e. GECAM-A and GECAM-B) dedicated to monitoring gamma-ray transients including gravitational waves high-energy electromagnetic counterparts, Gamma-ray Bursts, Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters, Solar Flares and Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes. Since launch in December 2020, GECAM-B has detected hundreds of astronomical and terrestrial events. For these bursts, localization is the key for burst identification and classification as well as follow-up observations in multi-wavelength. Here, we propose a Bayesian localization method with Poisson data with Gaussian background profile likelihood to localize GECAM bursts based on the burst counts distribution in detectors with different orientations. We demonstrate that this method can work well for all kinds of bursts, especially for extremely short ones. In addition, we propose a new method to estimate the systematic error of localization based on a confidence level test, which can overcome some problems of the existing method in literature. We validate this method by Monte Carlo simulations, and then apply it to a burst sample with accurate location and find that the mean value of the systematic error of GECAM-B localization is $\sim 2.5^{\circ}$. By considering this systematic error, we can obtain a reliable localization probability map for GECAM bursts. Our methods can be applied to other gamma-ray monitors.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: Gravitational wave high-energy Electromagnetic Counterpart All-sky Monitor (GECAM) is a pair of microsatellites (i.e. GECAM-A and GECAM-B) dedicated to monitoring gamma-ray transients including gravitational waves high-energy electromagnetic counterparts, Gamma-ray Bursts, Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters, Solar Flares and Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes. Since launch in December 2020, GECAM-B has detected hundreds of astronomical and terrestrial events. For these bursts, localization is the key for burst identification and classification as well as follow-up observations in multi-wavelength. Here, we propose a Bayesian localization method with Poisson data with Gaussian background profile likelihood to localize GECAM bursts based on the burst counts distribution in detectors with different orientations. We demonstrate that this method can work well for all kinds of bursts, especially for extremely short ones. In addition, we propose a new method to estimate the systematic error of localization based on a confidence level test, which can overcome some problems of the existing method in literature. We validate this method by Monte Carlo simulations, and then apply it to a burst sample with accurate location and find that the mean value of the systematic error of GECAM-B localization is $\sim 2.5^{\circ}$. By considering this systematic error, we can obtain a reliable localization probability map for GECAM bursts. Our methods can be applied to other gamma-ray monitors.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: Fast and reliable localization of high-energy transients is crucial for characterizing the burst properties and guiding the follow-up observations. Localization based on the relative counts of different detectors has been widely used for all-sky gamma-ray monitors. There are two major methods for this counts distribution localization: $\chi^{2}$ minimization method and the Bayesian method. Here we propose a modified Bayesian method that could take advantage of both the accuracy of the Bayesian method and the simplicity of the $\chi^{2}$ method. With comprehensive simulations, we find that our Bayesian method with Poisson likelihood is generally more applicable for various bursts than $\chi^{2}$ method, especially for weak bursts. We further proposed a location-spectrum iteration approach based on the Bayesian inference, which could alleviate the problems caused by the spectral difference between the burst and location templates. Our method is very suitable for scenarios with limited computation resources or time-sensitive applications, such as in-flight localization software, and low-latency localization for rapid follow-up observations.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: The Earth occultation technique has broad applications in both astronomy and atmospheric density measurements. We construct the background model during the occultation of the Crab Nebula observed by the Insight-Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (Insight-HXMT) at energies between 6 keV and 100 keV. We propose a Bayesian atmospheric density retrieval method based on the Earth occultation technique, combining Poisson and Gaussian statistics. By modeling the atmospheric attenuation of X-ray photons during the occultation, we simultaneously retrieved the neutral densities of the atmosphere at different altitude ranges. Our method considers the correlation of densities between neighboring atmospheric layers and reduces the potential systematic bias to which previous work may be subject. Previous analyses based on light curve fitting or spectral fitting also lost some spectral or temporal information of the data. In contrast to previous work, the occultation data observed by the three telescopes onboard Insight-HXMT is fully used in our analysis, further reducing the statistical error in density retrieval. We apply our method to cross-check the (semi-)empirical atmospheric models, using 115 sets of occultation data of the Crab Nebula observed by Insight-HXMT. We find that the retrieved neutral density is ~10%, ~20%, and ~25% less than the values of the widely used atmospheric model NRLMSISE-00, in the altitude range of 55--80 km, 80--90 km, and 90--100 km, respectively. We also show that the newly released atmospheric model NRLMSIS 2.0 is generally consistent with our density measurements.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: Searching for X-ray and gamma-ray bursts, including Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters (SGRs) and high energy transients associated with Gravitational wave (GW) events or Fast radio bursts (FRBs), is of great importance in the multi-messenger and multi-wavelength era. Although a coherent search based on the likelihood ratio and Gaussian statistics has been established and utilized in many studies, this Gaussian-based method could be problematic for weak and short bursts which usually have very few counts. To deal with all bursts including weak ones, here we propose the coherent search in Poisson statistics. We studied the difference between Poisson-based and Gaussian-based search methods by Monte Carlo simulations, and find that the Poisson-based search method has advantages compared to the Gaussian case especially for weak bursts. Our results show that, for very weak bursts with very low number of counts, the Poisson-based search can provide higher significance than the Gaussian-based search, and its likelihood ratio (for background fluctuation) still generally follows the chi2 distribution, making the significance estimation of searched bursts very convenient. Thus, we suggest that the coherent search based on Poisson likelihood ratio is more appropriate in the search for generic transients including very weak ones.