Reproducibility of Non-X-ray Background for the X-ray Imaging Spectrometer aboard Suzaku

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to accurately model the non-X-ray background for Suzaku's X-ray Imaging Spectrometer using PIN-UD data, achieving reproducibility better than cosmic background fluctuations.

Contribution

It introduces a new NXB modeling approach based on PIN-UD that improves reproducibility over previous methods.

Findings

NXB count rate correlates with PIN-UD and anti-correlates with cut-off-rigidity.

Modeling with PIN-UD yields 4.55-5.63% reproducibility in 1-7 keV band.

Reproducibility is smaller than cosmic X-ray background fluctuations.

Abstract

One of the advantages of the X-ray Imaging Spectrometer (XIS) system on board Suzaku is its low and stable non-X-ray background (NXB). In order to make the best use of this advantage, modeling the NXB spectra with high accuracy is important to subtract them from the spectra of on-source observations. We construct an NXB database by collecting XIS events when the dark Earth covers the XIS FOV. The total exposure time of the NXB data is about 785 ks for each XIS. It is found that the count rate of the NXB anti-correlates with the cut-off-rigidity and correlates with the count rate of the PIN upper discriminator (PIN-UD) in Hard X-ray Detector on board Suzaku. We thus model the NXB spectrum for a given on-source observation by employing either of these parameters and obtain a better reproducibility of the NXB for the model with PIN-UD than that with the cut-off-rigidity. The reproducibility of the NXB model with PIN-UD is 4.55-5.63% for each XIS NXB in the 1-7 keV band and 2.79-4.36% for each XIS NXB in the 5-12 keV band for each 5 ks exposure of the NXB data. This NXB reproducibility is much smaller than the spatial fluctuation of the cosmic X-ray background in the 1-7 keV band, and is almost comparable to that in the 5-12 keV band.