PEBS - Positron Electron Balloon Spectrometer

Abstract

The best measurement of the cosmic ray positron flux available today was performed by the HEAT balloon experiment more than 10 years ago. Given the limitations in weight and power consumption for balloon experiments, a novel approach was needed to design a detector which could increase the existing data by more than a factor of 100. Using silicon photomultipliers for the readout of a scintillating fiber tracker and of an imaging electromagnetic calorimeter, the PEBS detector features a large geometrical acceptance of 2500 cm^2 sr for positrons, a total weight of 1500 kg and a power consumption of 600 W. The experiment is intended to measure cosmic ray particle spectra for a period of up to 20 days at an altitude of 40 km circulating the North or South Pole. A full Geant 4 simulation of the detector concept has been developed and key elements have been verified in a testbeam in October 2006 at CERN.

5 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Proceedings of the 11th Vienna Conference on Instrumentation

References in corpus (5)

• DarkSUSY: Computing Supersymmetric Dark Matter Properties Numerically
• Cosmic-ray positron fraction measurement from 1 to 30 GeV with AMS-01
• New Measurement of the Cosmic-Ray Positron Fraction from 5 to 15 GeV
• Performance of the AMS-02 Transition Radiation Detector
• A high resolution scintillating fiber tracker with SiPM readout for the PEBS experiment

Cited by in corpus (4)

• New Positron Spectral Features from Supersymmetric Dark Matter - a Way to Explain the PAMELA Data?
• Two dark matter components in N_{DM}MSSM and dark matter extension of the minimal supersymmetric standard model and the high energy positron spectrum in PAMELA/HEAT data
• Silicon photomultiplier arrays - a novel photon detector for a high resolution tracker produced at FBK-irst, Italy
• A high resolution scintillating fiber tracker with SiPM readout for the PEBS experiment