We present an innovative soft X-ray polarimeter and spectrometer SOLPEX, the instrument to be mounted aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015/2016. The SOLPEX will be composed of three individual measuring units: the soft X-ray polarimeter with 1-2% linear polarization detection limit, a fast-rotating drum X-ray spectrometer with very high time resolution (0.1s) and a simple pin-hole soft X-ray imager-spectrometer with moderate spatial (~20arcsec), spectral (0.5 keV) and high time resolution (0.1s). This set of instruments will provide unique opportunity to complement the efforts to reliably measure the X-ray polarization and contribute towards understanding the physics of solar flares. The standard flare model states that electrons are being accelerated in specific regions of the corona at or near magnetic reconnection site and then propagate along reconnected magnetic field lines toward the atmospheric denser layers. There, they are decelerated and lose their energy mainly through the bremsstrahlung process. Deposited energy is readily converted to directed evaporation of the plasma to be detected through the Doppler-shifted emission lines in extreme ultraviolet and soft X-ray spectral ranges Due to highly anisotropic character of impulsive phase electron beams, resulting emission is expected to be polarized. Both these processes: bremsstrahlung emission of supposedly polarized X-ray flux and accompanying plasma evaporation velocities are to be simultaneously observed by the proposed SOLPEX instruments.

Date Published: 5 December 2014
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 9441, 19th Polish-Slovak-Czech Optical Conference on Wave and Quantum Aspects of Contemporary Optics, 94410T (5 December 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2176043

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9441:
19th Polish-Slovak-Czech Optical Conference on Wave and Quantum Aspects of Contemporary Optics
Agnieszka Popiolek-Masajada; Waclaw Urbanczyk, Editor(s)