Characterisation of Cosmic Ray Induced Noise Events in AstroSat-CZT Imager

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how cosmic rays induce noise in the AstroSat-CZT detector, identifying multiple triggering patterns and delayed emissions, and presents an algorithm to detect these cosmic ray-induced events.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of cosmic ray effects on CZT detectors and develops an algorithm for automatic detection of cosmic ray-induced noise events.

Findings

Cosmic rays trigger multiple closely packed events in detectors.

Higher energy cosmic rays can cause delayed emissions.

An effective clustering algorithm for detecting cosmic ray events is proposed.

Abstract

The Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CZT) Imager onboard AstroSat, consists of pixelated CZT detectors, which are sensitive to hard X-rays above 20 keV. The individual pixels are triggered by ionising events occurring in them, and the detectors operate in a self-triggered mode, recording each event separately with information about its time of incidence, detector co-ordinates, and channel that scales with the amount of ionisation. The detectors are sensitive not only to photons from astrophysical sources of interest, but also prone to a number of other events like background X-rays, cosmic rays, and noise in detectors or the electronics. In this work a detailed analysis of the effect of cosmic rays on the detectors is made and it is found that cosmic rays can trigger multiple events which are closely packed in time (called 'bunches'). Higher energy cosmic rays, however, can also generate delayed emissions, a signature previously seen in the PICsIT detector on-board INTEGRAL. An algorithm to automatically detect them based on their spatial clustering properties is presented. Residual noise events are examined using examples of Gamma Ray Bursts as target sources.