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Charge measurement of cosmic ray nuclei with the plastic scintillator detector of DAMPE

2018; Elsevier BV; Volume: 105; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.astropartphys.2018.10.001

1873-2852

Tiekuang Dong, Yapeng Zhang, Peng-Xiong Ma, Yongjie Zhang, P. Bernardini, Meng Ding, D. Y. Guo, Shijun Lei, Xiang Li, I. De Mitri, Wen-Xi Peng, Rui Qiao, Margherita Di Santo, Zhiyu Sun, A. Surdo, Zhaomin Wang, Jian Wu, Zun-Lei Xu, Yuhong Yu, Qiang Yuan, Chuan Yue, Jing-Jing Zang, Yunlong Zhang,

Particle Detector Development and Performance

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.