Search

We report the results and analysis methods from field-testing the imaging calorimeter prototype for the Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope (APT) through an antarctic balloon flight (in the 2019 austral Antarctic balloon season) and through a CERN heavy-ion beam test in 2018. The Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope is a proposed space-based gamma- and cosmic-ray instrument that utilizes a novel distributed imaging calorimeter for both particle tracking and energy reconstruction. The imaging CsI calorimeter (ICC) consists of a CsI:Na scintillator read out by (WLS) fibers in both the x- and y-planes. To function both as a gamma-ray and cosmic-ray instrument APT must operate over a large dynamic range, from the single photon-election regime for low energy gamma-ray events to high-$Z$ cosmic-ray events. Analysis of data from a 150 mm x 150 mm prototype instrument (APTlite) on a piggy-back flight on the 2019 SuperTIGER-2.3 balloon instrument provided cosmic ray data that were used to demonstrate the key detector and electronics elements of the ICC. Significantly, analysis of flight data demonstrated the large dynamic range of the instrument, showing the possibility to reconstruct the nuclear charge through analysis of the scintillation tail of saturating high-Z cosmic-ray events by utilizing the deep memory depth available to the TARGET waveform digitizer electronics. Spatial reconstruction of events was performed using a two-sided Voigt profile demonstrating position localization within the imaging calorimeter plane to less 3 WLS fiber widths. Charge resolution was evaluated on a 50 mm x 50 mm prototype placed in the 150 GeV/nuc, A/Z = 2.2 CERN SPS beam line. Nuclei were tagged using HNX/TIGERISS silicon-strip detectors and silicon pad detectors, which allowed for fragmentation cuts in the data. The vastly saturating signals were reconstructed from the CsI:Na scintillation tail and show an APT charge resolution up to Z = 11 (with experimental limitations preventing full evaluation for Z larger 11) and demonstrated no significant non-linearity in the Z$^2$ measurement derived from the CsI:Na optical signal response up to $Z=82$.

We present a pipeline for fast GRB source localization for the Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope. APT records multiple Compton scatterings of incoming photons across 20 CsI detector layers, from which we infer the incident angle of each photon's first scattering to localize its source direction to a circle centered on the vector formed by its first two scatterings. Circles from multiple photons are then intersected to identify their common source direction. Our pipeline, which runs in real time on low-power hardware, uses an efficient tree search to determine the most likely ordering of scatterings for each photon (which cannot be measured due to the coarse time-scale of detection), followed by likelihood-weighted averaging and iterative least-squares refinement to combine all circles into an estimated source direction. Uncertainties in the scattering locations and energy deposits require that our pipeline be robust to high levels of noise. To test our methods, we reconstructed GRB events produced by a Geant4 simulation of APT's detectors paired with a second simulator that models measurement noise induced by the detector hardware. Our methods proved robust against noise and the effects of pair production, producing sub-degree localization for GRBs with fluence 0.3 MeV/cm^2. GRBs with fluence 0.03 MeV/cm^2 provided fewer photons for analysis but could still be localized within 2.5 degrees 68% of the time. Localization time for a 1-second 1.0 MeV/cm^2 GRB, measured on a quad-core, 1.4 GHz ARMv8 processor (Raspberry Pi 3B+), was consistently under 0.2 seconds — fast enough to permit real-time redirection of other instruments for follow-up observations.

We present simulations of the instrument performance of the Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope (APT), a mission concept of a $\gamma$-ray and cosmic-ray observatory in a sun-Earth Lagrange orbit. The key components of the APT detector include a multiple-layer tracker composed of scintillating fibers and an imaging calorimeter composed of thin layers of CsI:Na scintillators. The design is aimed at maximizing effective area and field of view for $\gamma$-ray and cosmic-ray measurements, subject to constraints on instrument cost and total payload mass. We simulate a detector design based on $3$-meter scintillating fibers and develop reconstruction algorithms for $\gamma$-rays from a few hundreds of $\mathrm{keV}$ up to a few $\mathrm{TeV}$ energies. At the photon energy above $30~\mathrm{MeV}$, pair-production/shower reconstruction is applied; the results show that APT could provide an order of magnitude improvement in effective area and sensitivity for $\gamma$-ray detection compared with the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). A multiple-Compton-scattering reconstruction at photon energies below $10~\mathrm{MeV}$ achieves sensitive detection of faint $\gamma$-ray bursts (GRBs) and other $\gamma$-ray transients down to $\sim0.01~\mathrm{MeV/cm}^2$ with degree-level to sub-degree-level localization accuracy. The Compton analysis also provides a measurement of polarization where the minimum detectable degree of polarization for $\sim1~\mathrm{MeV/cm}^2$ GRBs is below $20\%$. In addition to the APT simulations, we present the simulated performance of the Antarctic Demonstrator for APT, a 0.5m-square cross section balloon experiment that includes all of the key elements of the full APT detector.

We describe the development of a future gamma-ray/cosmic-ray mission called the Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope (APT). The instrument will combine a pair tracker and Compton telescope in a single monolithic design. By using scintillating fibers for the tracker and wavelength-shifting fibers to readout CsI detectors, the instrument will achieve an order of magnitude improvement in sensitivity compared with Fermi but with fewer readout channels, and lower complexity. By incorporating multiple Compton imaging over a very large effective area, the instrument will also achieve orders of magnitude improvement in MeV sensitivity compared with other proposed instruments. The mission would have a broad impact on astroparticle physics; primary science drivers for the mission include: (1) probing WIMP dark matter across the entire natural mass range and annihilation cross section for a thermal WIMP, (2) providing a nearly all-sky instantaneous FoV, with prompt sub-degree localization and polarization measurements for gamma-rays transients such as neutron-star mergers and (3) making measurements of rare utra-heavy cosmic ray nuclei to distinguish between n-star merger and SNae r-process synthesis of the heavy elements. We will describe ongoing work including a series of accelerator beam tests, a piggy-back Antactic flight (APTlite) and the recently funded long-duration balloon mission: the Antarctic Demonstrator for APT (ADAPT).

The response to 150 GeV/nuc primary lead ($^{208}$Pb) and fragmented (A/Z=2.4, 2.2, 2.0) beams measured a silicon strip detector, designed for use in the Heavy Nuclei eXplorer (HNX) and an upgrade of the Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder (SuperTIGER) balloon experiment, was evaluated in a CERN test beam (H8A) during Nov - Dec 2018. The 500 $\mu$m thick, single-sided silicon detectors have 32 DC-coupled strips with 3 mm pitch on the junction side with $9.6 \times 9.6$ cm$^2$ active area. Discrete charge-preamplifiers and shaping amplifiers were used to read out the ohmic and junction side signals simultaneously using the SuperTIGER DAQ system. We report on the response in a configuration where all 32 strips were joined and read out together. The strip detector-under-test was situated between planar silicon detectors, which provided the charge selection as well as a comparison of the measured response of each detector. The combined data set shows excellent charge resolution and finely resolved elemental peaks from helium (Z=2) through lead (Z=82). In this paper, we provide a description of the test beam experiment and the results of the charge resolution analysis.

Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM) are increasingly being used in ground-based astrophysics experiments as a replacement for Photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). These compact low power, rugged sensors are also well suited for space applications and have an added advantage over PMTs in that they do not require high-voltage bias. Efforts are underway at NASA Goddard and our collaborators to develop large-area arrays of SiPMs as the readout for the upcoming funded CubeSat missions such as BurstCube and Terrestrial RaYs Analysis and Detection (TRYAD) and also larger missions including the ultra-heavy cosmic-ray Heavy Nuclei Explorer (HNX) experiment and the gamma-ray Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope (APT) experiment. Our team has recently tested SiPMs in a heavy ion beam at CERN. The primary beam consisted of lead ions with energy of ~150 GeV/nuc. SiPM hardware was exposed to both a pure and fragmented Pb beam allowing us to look at ions from Z=1 to Z=82. We report in this paper on direct comparisons with the performance of Hamamatsu R1924A photomultipliers in addition to examining the signals (and subsequent effects) from direct exposure to a lead beam.