Direct demodulation technique for rotating modulation collimator imaging

Abstract

Rotating modulation collimator (RMC) is an important imaging technique in hard X-ray astronomy. With traditional inversion techniques, the sensitivity, angular resolution and ability of simultaneous imaging of point sources and extended emission are not good enough in many practical cases. In this work, a new inversion technique, the direct demodulation method, is applied to analyse simulated data of an RMC telescope. The results show that the image quality from direct demodulation are improved significantly in comparison with that from traditional inversion techniques, such as the cross-correlation method and the CLEAN cross-correlation method. From an RMC telescope with a simple bi-grid collimator and the direct demodulation technique, we can do imaging for both discrete and extended sources.