The Athena X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU)
By D. Barret
This proceeding of the SPIE 2016 Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation symposium, reviews the core scientific objectives of Athena as driving the X-IFU performance requirements and describes some of the observatory science goals relevant for the X-IFU. Moreover, it presents the current instrument performance and its design at the time of the mission consolidation review concluded in May 2016.
The breakthrough capabilities of the X-IFU are illustrated in the figure, which shows the expected X-IFU spectrum of the core of the Perseus cluster, based on very recent results obtained with the Hitomi Soft X-ray Spectrometer.
The image shows the simulated X-IFU spectrum of the core of the Perseus cluster, based on Hitomi SXS observations (Hitomi collaboration, Nature, Volume 535, Issue 7610, pp. 117-121 (2016); Courtesy of A.C. Fabian and C. Pinto). The grey area indicates the region not fully explored by Hitomi/SXS. The insets show the region around the iron L and K complexes. The wealth of information provided by such a spectrum, that will be measured on sub arcminute scales, enables in depth studies of the physical properties of the hot cluster gas (e.g. temperature, density, turbulence, bulk motion, abundance, . . . ). Credit: Athena and X-IFU teams.