Wide-Field MAXI: soft X-ray transient monitor

TL;DR

Wide-Field MAXI is a proposed all-sky X-ray monitor designed to detect and localize transient X-ray events, including electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves, with a broad energy range and large field of view.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mission concept combining wide energy coverage and a large sky coverage to detect X-ray transients associated with gravitational-wave events.

Findings

Design specifications for the SLC and HXM instruments

Expected detection capabilities for X-ray transients

Potential to identify electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational waves

Abstract

Wide-Field MAXI (WF-MAXI: Wide-Field Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image) is a proposed mission to detect and localize X-ray transients including electro-magnetic counterparts of gravitational-wave events such as gamma-ray bursts and supernovae etc., which are expected to be directly detected for the first time in late 2010's by the next generation gravitational telescopes such as Advanced LIGO and KAGRA. The most distinguishing characteristics of WF-MAXI are a wide energy range from 0.7 keV to 1 MeV and a large field of view (~25 % of the entire sky), which are realized by two main instruments: (i) Soft X-ray Large Solid Angle Camera (SLC) which consists of four pairs of crisscross coded aperture cameras using CCDs as one-dimensional fast-readout detectors covering 0.7 - 12 keV and (ii) Hard X-ray Monitor (HXM) which is a multi-channel array of crystal scintillators coupled with avalanche photo-diodes covering 20 keV - 1 MeV.