Point source detection performance of Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope imaging observation

Abstract

The Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT) will perform an all-sky survey in the hard X-ray band as well as deep imaging of a series of small sky regions. We expect various compact objects to be detected in these imaging observations. Point source detection performance of HXMT imaging observation depends not only on the instrument but also on the data analysis method that is applied since images are reconstructed from HXMT observed data with numerical methods. The denoising technique used plays an important part in the HXMT imaging data analysis pipeline along with demodulation and source detection. In this paper we have implemented several methods for denoising HXMT data and evaluated the point source detection performances in terms of sensitivities and location accuracies. The results show that direct demodulation with 1-fold cross-correlation should be the default reconstruction and regularization method, although both sensitivity and location accuracy could be further improved by selecting and tuning numerical methods in data analysis used for HXMT imaging observations.