Exploring Sub-MeV Sensitivity of AstroSat-CZTI for ON-axis Bright Sources

TL;DR

This paper investigates extending AstroSat-CZTI's spectroscopic energy range below 1 MeV for bright on-axis sources by utilizing Compton events and low gain pixels, demonstrated through Crab observations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to enhance CZTI's energy sensitivity up to 700 keV by including low gain pixels and Compton events, improving its spectroscopic capabilities.

Findings

Spectroscopic range can be extended up to 700 keV with calibration.

Including low gain pixels improves sensitivity for bright sources.

Crab observations validate the extended energy range technique.

Abstract

The Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager (CZTI) onboard AstroSat is designed for hard X-ray imaging and spectroscopy in the energy range of 20 - 100 keV. The CZT detectors are of 5 mm thickness and hence have good efficiency for Compton interactions beyond 100 keV. The polarisation analysis using CZTI relies on such Compton events and have been verified experimentally. The same Compton events can also be used to extend the spectroscopy up to 380 keV. Further, it has been observed that about 20% pixels of the CZTI detector plane have low gain, and they are excluded from the primary spectroscopy. If these pixels are included, then the spectroscopic capability of CZTI can be extended up to 500 keV and further up to 700 keV with a better gain calibration in the future. Here we explore the possibility of using the Compton events as well as the low gain pixels to extend the spectroscopic energy range of CZTI for ON-axis bright X-ray sources. We demonstrate this technique using Crab observations and explore its sensitivity.