Calibration of the DAMPE Plastic Scintillator Detector and its on-orbit performance

Abstract

DArk Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) is a space-borne apparatus for detecting the high-energy cosmic-rays like electrons, $\gamma$-rays, protons and heavy-ions. Plastic Scintillator Detector (PSD) is the top-most sub-detector of the DAMPE. The PSD is designed to measure the charge of incident high-energy particles and it also serves as a veto detector for discriminating $\gamma$-rays from charged particles. In this paper, PSD on-orbit calibration procedure is described, which includes five steps of pedestal, dynode correlation, response to minimum-ionizing particles (MIPs), light attenuation function and energy reconstruction. A method for reconstructing the charge of incident high energy cosmic-ray particles is introduced. The detection efficiency of each PSD strip is verified to be above 99.5%, the total efficiency of the PSD for charged particles is above 99.99%.

arXiv comment11 pages, 16 figures, Submitted to Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics (RAA)

References in corpus (6)

• The Large Area Telescope on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope Mission
• Direct detection of a break in the teraelectronvolt cosmic-ray spectrum of electrons and positrons
• The DArk Matter Particle Explorer mission
• Origin of Cosmic Rays
• The Plastic Scintillator Detector at DAMPE
• The calibration and electron energy reconstruction of the BGO ECAL of the DAMPE detector

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Measurement of the cosmic ray helium energy spectrum from 70 GeV to 80 TeV with the DAMPE space mission
• Calibration and performance of the neutron detector onboard of the DAMPE mission
• A deep learning method for the trajectory reconstruction of cosmic rays with the DAMPE mission
• Correction Method for the Readout Saturation of the DAMPE Calorimeter
• DmpIRFs and DmpST: DAMPE Instrument Response Functions and Science Tools for Gamma-Ray Data Analysis
• Event plane determination from Zero Degree Calorimeter at the Cooling-Storage-Ring External-target Experiment
• Emergent gravity fails to explain color-dependent galaxy-galaxy lensing signals from SDSS Dr7
• Machine learning-based method of calorimeter saturation correction for helium flux analysis with DAMPE experiment
• Hadronic cross section measurements with the DAMPE space mission using 20GeV-10TeV cosmic-ray protons and ${}^4$He
• Energy correction based on fluorescence attenuation of DAMPE