Compton Polarimeter Prototype for the CUbesat Solar Polarimeter (CUSP) mission

The space-based CUbesat Solar Polarimeter (CUSP) mission aims to measure the linear polarization of solar flares in the hard X-ray band (25-100 keV) by means of a dual-phase Compton polarimeter. CUSP will allow to study the magnetic reconnection and particle acceleration in the flaring magnetic structures of our star with its unprecedented sensitivity to solar flare polarization. CUSP is a project under development as part of the Alcor Program of the Italian Space Agency aimed at developing new CubeSat missions. In the frame of CUSP's Phase B, which started in December 2024, a flight-representative prototype of the Compton polarimeter has been developed and characterized with hard X-ray sources in the laboratory. This prototype consists of a 4 times 4 central matrix of plastic scintillator bars surrounded by 4 strips of 8 elongated GAGG scintillators, respectively coupled to a multi-anode photomultiplier tube and arrays of avalanche photodiodes. These sensors are read out by custom front-end electronics based on MAROC-3A and SKIROC-2A ASICs with a Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA. The plastic scintillators act as scatterers, while the GAGG bars fully absorb the scattered photons. Coincident plastic-GAGG events allow for reconstructing the Compton scattering direction, whose distribution allows for inferring the polarization parameters of the source. We report here the measured performance of the polarimeter prototype using well-known radioactive isotopes and X-ray tubes, allowing us to assess the performance of our polarimeter prototype over the full 25-100 keV energy range.