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arXiv · 2407.04134

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

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.

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Giovanni De Cesare, Sergio Fabiani, Riccardo Campana, Giovanni Lombardi, Ettore Del Monte, Enrico Costa, Ilaria Baffo, Sergio Bonomo, Daniele Brienza, Mauro Centrone, Gessica Contini, Giovanni Cucinella, Andrea Curatolo, Nicolas De Angelis, Andrea Del Re, Sergio Di Cosimo, Simone Di Filippo, Alessandro Di Marco, Giuseppe Di Persio, Immacolata Donnarumma, Pierluigi Fanelli, Paolo Leonetti, Alfredo Locarini, Pasqualino Loffredo, Gabriele Minervini, Dario Modenini, Fabio Muleri, Silvia Natalucci, Andrea Negri, Massimo Perelli, Monia Rossi, Alda Rubini, Emanuele Scalise, Paolo Soffitta, Andrea Terracciano, Paolo Tortora, Emauele Zaccagnino, Alessandro Zambardi. 2024-07-04. The evaluation of the CUSP scientific performance by a GEANT4 Monte Carlo simulation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04134

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