Speaker
Description
We develop an end-to-end simulation pipeline to evaluate the detectability of high-frequency quasiperiodic oscillations (HFQPOs) in signals from black hole X-ray binaries with various space observatories. Light curves (LC) from analytic (Karas, 1996) and ray traced (Bakala et al., 2007, 2015) hotspot models are combined with the global flux of microquasar GRS 1915+105; and photon events with SIXTE (Dauser et al., 2019), using SIMPUT (Schmid et al., 2013), for XRISM (Tashiro, 2022) and the planned newATHENA (Cruise et al., 2024) are generated. We analyze power density spectra (PDS) of observed LC to recover the fundamental and harmonic frequency peaks across models and signal-to-background ratios. The study benchmarks simulated performance against RXTE and LOFT to validate the capabilities of new missions to observe HFQPOs. We found that WFI detector onboard newATHENA robustly recovers the HFQPO fundamental and harmonics for the tested setups; XRISM/Resolve (GV closed) recovers only strong fundamentals in short exposures, with harmonics generally below detectability.