Browsing by Author "Fleischhack, Henrike"

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    Improving the Low-energy Transient Sensitivity of AMEGO-X using Single-site Events
    (IOP Publishing, 2022) Martinez-Castellanos, I.; Fleischhack, Henrike; Karwin, C.; Negro, M.; Tak, D.; Lien, Amy; Kierans, C. A.; Wadiasingh, Zorawar; Fukazawa, Yasushi; Ajello, Marco; Baring, Matthew G.; Burns, E.; Caputo, R.; Hartmann, Dieter H.; Perkins, Jeremy S.; Racusin, Judith L.; Sheng, Yong
    AMEGO-X, the All-sky Medium Energy Gamma-ray Observatory eXplorer, is a proposed instrument designed to bridge the so-called "MeV gap" by surveying the sky with unprecedented sensitivity from ∼100 keV to about 1 GeV. This energy band is of key importance for multimessenger and multiwavelength studies but it is nevertheless currently underexplored. AMEGO-X addresses this situation by proposing a design capable of detecting and imaging gamma rays via both Compton interactions and pair production processes. However, some of the objects that AMEGO-X will study, such as gamma-ray bursts and magnetars, extend to energies below ∼100 keV where the dominant interaction becomes photoelectric absorption. These events deposit their energy in a single pixel of the detector. In this work we show how the ∼3500 cm2 effective area of the AMEGO-X tracker to events between ∼25 and ∼100 keV will be utilized to significantly improve its sensitivity and expand the energy range for transient phenomena. Although imaging is not possible for single-site events, we show how we will localize a transient source in the sky using their aggregate signal to within a few degrees. This technique will more than double the number of cosmological gamma-ray bursts seen by AMEGO-X, allow us to detect and resolve the pulsating tails of extragalactic magnetar giant flares, and increase the number of detected less-energetic magnetar bursts—some possibly associated with fast radio bursts. Overall, single-site events will increase the sensitive energy range, expand the science program, and promptly alert the community of fainter transient events.