Atmospheric Response for MeV Gamma Rays Observed with Balloon-Borne Detectors

TL;DR

This paper models the atmospheric response to MeV gamma rays for balloon-borne detectors, highlighting how scattering significantly distorts measurements, especially at lower energies, and emphasizing the importance of accounting for this in data analysis.

Contribution

The study provides a detailed simulation of gamma-ray transport in the atmosphere, quantifying the impact of scattering on measured fluxes across different energies and source configurations.

Findings

Scattered gamma-ray component increases at lower energies, up to 2-4 times the direct flux.

Scattering effects are more pronounced for diffuse sources than point sources.

Atmospheric scattering can significantly distort gamma-ray spectra in balloon observations.

Abstract

The atmospheric response for MeV gamma rays (~ 0.1 - 10 MeV) can be characterized in terms of two observed components. The first component is due to photons that reach the detector without scattering. The second component is due to photons that reach the detector after scattering one or more times. While the former can be determined in a straightforward manner, the latter is much more complex to quantify, as it requires tracking the transport of all source photons that are incident on Earth's atmosphere. The scattered component can cause a significant energy-dependent distortion in the measured spectrum, which is important to account for when making balloon-borne observations. In this work we simulate the full response for gamma-ray transport in the atmosphere. We find that the scattered component becomes increasingly more significant towards lower energies, and at 0.1 MeV it may increase the measured flux by as much as a factor of ~2-4, depending on the photon index and off-axis angle of the source. This is particularly important for diffuse sources, whereas the effect from scattering can be significantly reduced for point sources observed with an imaging telescope.