Charge Measurement of Cosmic Ray Nuclei with the Plastic Scintillator Detector of DAMPE

Abstract

One of the main purposes of the DArk Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) is to measure the cosmic ray nuclei up to several tens of TeV or beyond, whose origin and propagation remains a hot topic in astrophysics. The Plastic Scintillator Detector (PSD) on top of DAMPE is designed to measure the charges of cosmic ray nuclei from H to Fe and serves as a veto detector for discriminating gamma-rays from charged particles. We propose in this paper a charge reconstruction procedure to optimize the PSD performance in charge measurement. Essentials of our approach, including track finding, alignment of PSD, light attenuation correction, quenching and equalization correction are described detailedly in this paper after a brief description of the structure and operational principle of the PSD. Our results show that the PSD works very well and almost all the elements in cosmic rays from H to Fe are clearly identified in the charge spectrum.

20 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (7)

• The Large Area Telescope on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope Mission
• PAMELA Measurements of Cosmic-ray Proton and Helium Spectra
• PAMELA - A Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics
• Discrepant hardening observed in cosmic-ray elemental spectra
• The DArk Matter Particle Explorer mission
• Proton and Helium Spectra from the CREAM-III Flight
• The Plastic Scintillator Detector at DAMPE

Cited by in corpus (16)

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• The on-orbit calibration of DArk Matter Particle Explorer
• Calibration and performance of the neutron detector onboard of the DAMPE mission
• A Method of Alignment of the Plastic Scintillator Detector of DAMPE
• Observations of Forbush Decreases of cosmic ray electrons and positrons with the Dark Matter Particle Explorer
• A deep learning method for the trajectory reconstruction of cosmic rays with the DAMPE mission
• Measurement of the cosmic p+He energy spectrum from 50 GeV to 0.5 PeV with the DAMPE space mission
• Correction Method for the Readout Saturation of the DAMPE Calorimeter
• Search for relativistic fractionally charged particles in space
• Study of the Global Alignment for the DAMPE Detector
• 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
• Diverse properties of electron Forbush decreases revealed by the Dark Matter Particle Explorer
• Investigation of hadronic cross sections of cosmic ray carbon and oxygen on BGO from 200 GeV to 10 TeV energy at the DAMPE experiment