The Swift-UVOT ultraviolet and visible grism calibration

TL;DR

This paper details the calibration process for the Swift UVOT grisms, including wavelength accuracy, flux calibration, and effective area, enabling precise ultraviolet and visible spectroscopy for astronomical observations.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive calibration of the Swift UVOT grisms across all detector positions and operational modes, including wavelength, flux, and effective area corrections.

Findings

Wavelength accuracy is 9-22 Angstrom depending on mode.

Flux calibration includes a coincidence loss correction with less than 20% error.

Effective area varies by a few percent in nominal modes, up to 15% in clocked modes.

Abstract

We present the calibration of the Swift UVOT grisms, of which there are two, providing low-resolution field spectroscopy in the ultraviolet and optical bands respectively. The UV grism covers the range 1700-5000 Angstrom with a spectral resolution of 75 at 2600 Angstrom for source magnitudes of u=10-16 mag, while the visible grism covers the range 2850-6600 Angstrom with a spectral resolution of 100 at 4000 Angstrom for source magnitudes of b=12-17 mag. This calibration extends over all detector positions, for all modes used during operations. The wavelength accuracy (1-sigma) is 9 Angstrom in the UV grism clocked mode, 17 Angstrom in the UV grism nominal mode and 22 Angstrom in the visible grism. The range below 2740 Angstrom in the UV grism and 5200 Angstrom in the visible grism never suffers from overlapping by higher spectral orders. The flux calibration of the grisms includes a correction we developed for coincidence loss in the detector. The error in the coincidence loss correction is less than 20%. The position of the spectrum on the detector only affects the effective area (sensitivity) by a few percent in the nominal modes, but varies substantially in the clocked modes. The error in the effective area is from 9% in the UV grism clocked mode to 15% in the visible grism clocked mode .