The x-/gamma-ray camera ECLAIRs for the gamma-ray burst mission SVOM

We present ECLAIRs, the Gamma-ray burst (GRB) trigger camera to fly on-board the Chinese-French mission SVOM. ECLAIRs is a wide-field (~ 2 sr) coded mask camera with a mask transparency of 40% and a 1024 cm 2 detection plane coupled to a data processing unit, so-called UGTS, which is in charge of locating GRBs in near real time thanks to image and rate triggers. We present the instrument science requirements and how the design of ECLAIRs has been optimized to increase its sensitivity to high-redshift GRBs and low-luminosity GRBs in the local Universe, by having a low-energy threshold of 4 keV. The total spectral coverage ranges from 4 to 150 keV. ECLAIRs is expected to detect ~ 200 GRBs of all types during the nominal 3 year mission lifetime. To reach a 4 keV low-energy threshold, the ECLAIRs detection plane is paved with 6400 4 × 4 mm 2 and 1 mm-thick Schottky CdTe detectors. The detectors are grouped by 32, in 8×4 matrices read by a low-noise ASIC, forming elementary modules called XRDPIX. In this paper, we also present our current efforts to investigate the performance of these modules with their front-end electronics when illuminated by charged particles and/or photons using radioactive sources. All measurements are made in different instrument configurations in vacuum and with a nominal in-flight detector temperature of −20°C. This work will enable us to choose the in-flight configuration that will make the best compromise between the science performance and the in-flight operability of ECLAIRs. We will show some highlights of this work.