A High Granularity Imaging Calorimeter for Cosmic-Ray Physics

Abstract

An imaging calorimeter has been designed and is being built for the PAMELA satellite-borne experiment. The physics goals of the experiment are the measurement of the flux of antiprotons, positrons and light isotopes in the cosmic radiation. The calorimeter is designed to perform a precise measurement of the total energy deposited, to reconstruct the spatial development of the showers (both in the longitudinal and in the transverse directions), and to measure the energy distribution along the shower itself. From this information, the calorimeter will identify antiprotons from a electron background and positrons in a background of protons with an efficiency of about 95% and a rejection power better than 10^-4. Furthermore, a self-trigger system has been implemented with the calorimeter that will be employed to measure high-energy (from about 300 GeV to more than 1 TeV) electrons. The instrument is composed of 22 layers of tungsten, each sandwiched between two "views" of silicon strip detectors (X and Y). The signals are read out by a custom VLSI front-end chip, the CR1.4P, specifically designed for the PAMELA calorimeter, with a dynamic range of 7.14 pC or 1400 mip (minimum ionizing particle). We report on the simulated performance and prototype design.

26 pages, 19 figures, elsart LATEX style, submitted to Nucl. Instrum. and Meth

References in corpus (1)

• In-Orbit Performance of the Space Telescope NINA and GCR Flux Measurements

Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Measurements of Cosmic-Ray Hydrogen and Helium Isotopes with the PAMELA experiment
• Launch of the Space experiment PAMELA
• Evidence of energy and charge sign dependence of the recovery time for the December 2006 Forbush event measured by the PAMELA experiment
• The FoCal prototype - an extremely fine-grained electromagnetic calorimeter using CMOS pixel sensors
• Time dependence of the flux of helium nuclei in cosmic rays measured by the PAMELA experiment between July 2006 and December 2009
• Lithium and Beryllium isotopes with the PAMELA experiment
• Spatial Resolution of Double-Sided Silicon Microstrip Detectors for the PAMELA Apparatus
• Chemical Composition of Galactic Cosmic Rays with Space Experiments
• Detection of the high energy component of Jovian electrons in Low Earth Orbit with the PAMELA experiment