The evaluation of the CUSP scientific performance by a GEANT4 Monte Carlo simulation

TL;DR

This paper uses GEANT4 Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the scientific performance of the CUSP CubeSat's detector, focusing on its effective area for hard X-ray solar flare measurements.

Contribution

It presents a detailed simulation model of the CUSP detector to assess its response and effective area, aiding in performance evaluation for solar flare polarization studies.

Findings

Effective area varies with beam energy

Detailed detector response model developed

Simulation results support mission design decisions

Abstract

The CUbesat Solar Polarimeter (CUSP) project is a CubeSat mission orbiting the Earth aimed to measure the linear polarization of solar flares in the hard X-ray band by means of a Compton scattering polarimeter. CUSP will allow to study the magnetic reconnection and particle acceleration in the flaring magnetic structures of our star. CUSP is a project in the framework of the Alcor Program of the Italian Space Agency aimed to develop new CubeSat missions. It is approved for a Phase B study. In this work, we report on the accurate simulation of the detector's response to evaluate the scientific performance. A GEANT4 Monte Carlo simulation is used to assess the physical interactions of the source photons with the detector and the passive materials. Using this approach, we implemented a detailed CUSP Mass Model. In this work, we report on the evaluation of the detector's effective area as a function of the beam energy.