Polarization Leakage and the IXPE Point-spread Function

Abstract

By measuring photoelectron tracks, the gas pixel detectors of the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer satellite provide estimates of the photon detection location and its electric vector position angle (EVPA). However, imperfections in reconstructing event positions blur the image, and EVPA-position correlations result in artificial polarized halos around bright sources. We introduce a new model describing this “polarization leakage” and use it to recover the on-orbit telescope point-spread functions, useful for faint-source detection and image reconstruction. These point-spread functions are more accurate than previous approximations or ground-calibrated products (Δ χ ^2 ≈ 3 × 10 ^4 and 4 × 10 ^4 respectively for a bright 10 ^6 -count source). We also define an algorithm for polarization leakage correction substantially more accurate than existing prescriptions (Δ χ ^2 ≈ 1 × 10 ^3 ). These corrections depend on the reconstruction method, and we supply prescriptions for the mission-standard “Moments” methods as well as for “Neural Net” event reconstruction. Finally, we present a method to isolate leakage contributions to polarization observations of extended sources and show that an accurate PSF allows the extraction of sub-PSF-scale polarization patterns.

Keywords

• Pulsar wind nebulae
• X-ray astronomy
• Polarimetry
• Open source software
• X-ray detectors