Calibration of the Stellar X-Ray Polarimeter

The Stellar X-Ray Polarimeter (SXRP) will be more than an order of magnitude more sensitive than any previous x-ray polarimeter in the 2-15 keV energy band. The SXRP is a focal plane detector for a Danish-Russian SODART telescope, which will be launched on the Russian Spectrum-X-Gamma (SXG) mission. The SXRP exploits the polarization dependence of Bragg reflection from a graphite crystal, and of Thomson scattering from a target of metallic lithium. The SXRP flight model (FM) was calibrated at a facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) equipped with polarized and unpolarized x-ray sources producing x-rays in the band pass for the graphite and the lithium scatterers. By adjusting the orientation of the SXRP with respect to the incident x-ray beam, it was possible to simulate the converging beam from a SODART telescope and to measure the SXRP response to telescope pointing errors. In this paper, we describe the SXRP-FM calibration and present results for the graphite polarimeter.