Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

Wide-Field MAXI: soft X-ray transient monitor

Makoto Arimoto
Nobuyuki Kawai, Yoichi Yatsu (Tokyo Tech), Hiroshi Tomida, Shiro Ueno, Masashi Kimura (JAXA), Tatehiro Mihara, Motoko Serino (RIKEN), Hiroshi Tsunemi (Osaka U.), Atsumasa Yoshida, Takanori Sakamoti (AGU), Takayoshi Kohmura (Tokyo U. of Sci.), Hitoshi Negoro (Nihon U.), Yoshihiro Ueda (Kyoto U.) and WF-MAXI team

Abstract:

{it Wide-Field MAXI} ({it WF-MAXI}: Wide-Field Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image) is a mission to detect and localize X-ray transients including electro-magnetic counterparts of gravitational-wave events such as gamma-ray bursts and supernovae, which are expected to be directly detected for the first time in late 2010's by the next generation gravitational telescopes such as advanced LIGO and KAGRA. The most characteristic features of {it WF-MAXI} are a wide energy range from 0.7 keV to 1 MeV and a large field of view ($sim$ 25 % of the entire sky), which are realized by two main instruments: (i) Soft X-ray Large Solid Angle Camera (SLC) which consists of four pairs of crisscross coded aperture cameras using CCD as one-dimensional fast-readout detectors covering 0.7 $-$ 12 keV and (ii) Hard X-ray Monitor (HXM) which is multi-channel arrays of crystal scintillators coupled with APDs covering 20 keV $-$ 1 MeV. In this presentation, we will show the detail of the SLC and HXM instruments and their current development status.