The LOFT Wide Field Monitor simulator

TL;DR

The paper introduces an end-to-end simulator for the LOFT Wide Field Monitor, enabling detailed performance assessment and configuration optimization for detecting X-ray transients and sources.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive simulator architecture for the LOFT WFM, allowing realistic modeling of observations and instrument response evaluation.

Findings

Simulator accurately reproduces astrophysical observations.

Enables assessment of WFM configurations against scientific requirements.

Supports optimization for transient detection and spectral/timing resolution.

Abstract

We present the simulator we developed for the Wide Field Monitor (WFM) aboard the Large Observatory For X-ray Timing (LOFT) mission, one of the four ESA M3 candidate missions considered for launch in the 2022-2024 timeframe. The WFM is designed to cover a large FoV in the same bandpass as the Large Area Detector (LAD, almost 50% of its accessible sky in the energy range 2-50 keV), in order to trigger follow-up observations with the LAD for the most interesting sources. Moreover, its design would allow to detect transient events with fluxes down to a few mCrab in 1-day exposure, for which good spectral and timing resolution would be also available (about 300 eV FWHM and 10 {\mu}s, respectively). In order to investigate possible WFM configurations satisfying these scientific requirements and assess the instrument performance, an end-to-end WFM simulator has been developed. We can reproduce a typical astrophysical observation, taking into account both mask and detector physical properties. We will discuss the WFM simulator architecture and the derived instrumental response.