Speaker
Tancredi Bernasconi
(University of Geneva)
Description
POLAR is a new space-borne gamma-ray polarimeter launched in September 2016 as part of the Chinese-Spacelab TG-2. POLAR does optimized polarisation measurements for the 50-500 keV component of GRBs with unprecedented precision by taking advantage of the non-uniformity of the Compton scattering angles. POLAR uses an array consisting of 1600 plastic scintillators to detect the incoming photons. It provides the location and the scattering angle. It has a relatively large effective area and a field of view of half of the sky. Up until April, POLAR has detected about 10 GRBs/month. Preliminary flight results and results from on-ground calibration measurements will be presented along with future prospects.
Author
Tancredi Bernasconi
(University of Geneva)
