Design and performance of the soft gamma-ray detector for the NeXT mission

The soft gamma-ray detector (SGD) onboard the Japanese future high energy astrophysics mission (NeXT) is a Compton telescope with narrow field of view, which utilizes Compton kinematics to enhance its background rejection capabilities. It is realized as a hybrid semiconductor gamma-ray detector which consists of silicon and cadmium telluride (CdTe) detectors. It can detect photons in a wide energy band (0.05-1 MeV) at a background level of 5 x 10(-7) counts/s/cm(2) /keV; the silicon layers are required to improve the performance at a lower energy band (< 0.3 MeV). Excellent energy resolution is the key feature of the SGD, allowing it to achieve both high angular resolution and good background rejection capability. An additional capability of the SGD, its ability to measure gamma-ray polarization, opens up a new window to study properties of astronomical objects. We will present the development of key technologies to realize the SGD: high quality CdTe, low noise front-end application-specific integrated circuit, and bump bonding technology. Energy resolutions of 1.7 keV (full-width at half-maximum) for CdTe pixel detectors and 1.1 keV for Si strip detectors have been measured. We also present the validation of Monte Carlo simulation used to evaluate the performance of the SGD.