Session 121 - Instrumentation: Status and Plans.
Oral session, Thursday, January 18
La Condesa, Hilton

[121.01] LXeCAT: A Balloon Borne Liquid Xenon Imaging Telescope for MeV Gamma-Ray Astronomy

E. Aprile, F. Xu, M. Zhou, P. Chen, N. Ishida (Columbia U.), T. Doke, J. Kiluchi (Waseda U., Japan), K. Masuda (Saitama College, Japan), E. L. Chupp, P. P. Dunphy (U. New Hampshire), G. Fishman, G. Pendleton (NASA-MSFC)

LXeCAT is a balloon borne experiment which will be capable of imaging \gamma-ray astrophysical sources in the energy region from 300 keV to 10 MeV, with a point source location accuracy of few arcminutes. The telescope consists of a Liquid Xenon Time Projection Chamber (LXe-TPC) as three-dimensional position sensitive detector, coupled to a coded aperture mask. A 10 liter LXe-TPC prototype with an active area of 20 cm \times 20 cm has been constructed to evaluate the design and engineering aspects of this type of detector for space applications and to test and calibrate its response for spectroscopy and imaging of \gamma-rays at MeV energies. In this paper we review the properties of LXeCAT and present results from laboratory tests of the prototype.