Developments toward the Nuclear Compton Telescope

Our collaboration has begun the design and development of a prototype high resolution Compton telescope utilizing 3-D imaging germanium detectors. The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT) is a balloon-borne soft gamma-ray (0.2-15 MeV) telescope to study astrophysical sources of nuclear line emission and polarization. NCT will study gamma-ray radiation with very high spectral resolution, moderate angular resolution, and high sensitivity. The instrument has a novel, ultra-compact design optimized for studying nuclear line emission in the critical 0.5-2 MeV range, and polarization in the 0.2-0.5 MeV range. We are currently developing a small NCT prototype for a conventional US balloon flight. This flight will critically test the novel instrument technologies, event analysis techniques, and background rejection capabilities we have developed for high resolution Compton telescopes.