In-flight performance of the DAMPE silicon tracker

Abstract

DAMPE (DArk Matter Particle Explorer) is a spaceborne high-energy cosmic ray and gamma-ray detector, successfully launched in December 2015. It is designed to probe astroparticle physics in the broad energy range from few GeV to 100 TeV. The scientific goals of DAMPE include the identification of possible signatures of Dark Matter annihilation or decay, the study of the origin and propagation mechanisms of cosmic-ray particles, and gamma-ray astronomy. DAMPE consists of four sub-detectors: a plastic scintillator strip detector, a Silicon-Tungsten tracKer-converter (STK), a BGO calorimeter and a neutron detector. The STK is composed of six double layers of single-sided silicon micro-strip detectors interleaved with three layers of tungsten for photon conversions into electron-positron pairs. The STK is a crucial component of DAMPE, allowing to determine the direction of incoming photons, to reconstruct tracks of cosmic rays and to estimate their absolute charge (Z). We present the in-flight performance of the STK based on two years of in-flight DAMPE data, which includes the noise behavior, signal response, thermal and mechanical stability, alignment and position resolution.

References in corpus (4)

• The DArk Matter Particle Explorer mission
• Internal alignment and position resolution of the silicon tracker of DAMPE determined with orbit data
• DAMPE silicon tracker on-board data compression algorithm
• Design of the readout electronics for the DAMPE Silicon Tracker detector

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Correction Method for the Readout Saturation of the DAMPE Calorimeter
• Study of the Global Alignment for the DAMPE Detector
• Machine learning-based method of calorimeter saturation correction for helium flux analysis with DAMPE experiment
• An Unsupervised Machine Learning Method for Electron--Proton Discrimination of the DAMPE Experiment
• Hadronic cross section measurements with the DAMPE space mission using 20GeV-10TeV cosmic-ray protons and ${}^4$He
• Simulation of DAMPE silicon microstrip detectors in the $\mathrm{Allpi}{\mathrm{x}}^2$ framework