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).

18th Incontri di Fisica delle Alte Energie, IFAE 2019, Naples, Italy, 8 Apr 2019 - 10 Aug 2019; Il nuovo cimento / C 43, 90 (2020). doi:10.1393/ncc/i2020-20090-7, The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be the next major observatory for Very High Energy (VHE) γ-ray astronomy. Its optical throughput calibration relies on muon Cherenkov rings. This work is aimed at developing a fast and efficient muon tagger at the camera level for the CTA telescopes. A novel technique to tag muons using the capabilities of silicon photomultiplier Compact High-Energy Camera CHEC-S, one of the design options for the camera of the Small Size Telescopes (SSTs), has been developed, studying and comparing different algorithms such as circle fitting, machine learning and simple pixel counting. Their performance in terms of efficiency and computation speed was investigated using simulations with varying levels of night sky background light. The application of the best performing method to the Large Size Telescope (LST) camera has been also studied, with the goal of improving the speed of the muon preselection., Published by Ed. Compositori, Bologna [u.a.]

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be the leading ground-base observatory for Very High Energy (VHE) γ-ray astronomy for the next decades. Its southern site will host about 70 Small Sized Telescopes (SSTs) which will determine the CTA sensitivity at γ-ray energies between 1 and 300 TeV. One of the design options for the SST cameras is the silicon photomultiplier-based Compact High-Energy Camera (CHEC-S). The back-end electronics (BEE) of CHEC-S interconnects the camera front-end modules, provides power and clock distribution, aggregation, routing and timestamping of data and most importantly it implements the camera trigger system. A novel technique to tag muons using the capabilities of this system has been developed, studying and comparing different algorithms such as circle fitting, machine learning and simple pixel counting. This contribution describes the design of the CHEC-S BEE, and presents the results of the performance of this muon tagger, its on telescope integration tests, and the prospects of using it for other Cherenkov Telescopes types of CTA.