Speaker
Description
The Southern Wide-Field Gamma-ray Observatory (SWGO) is an international collaboration for the design and construction of the first wide-field gamma-ray observatory in the southern hemisphere. The observatory will be primarily based on surface water-Cherenkov detectors (WCD) sensitive to gamma rays from a few hundred GeV to the PeV. As part of the SWGO R&D activities, we developed a large-scale hodoscope installed at the Brazilian Center for Physics Research (CBPF) in Rio de Janeiro to test, characterize, and calibrate different WCD designs for SWGO. The modular set-up structure can accommodate WCD configurations up to 3 m in height and 30 m3 total water volume. The hodoscope employs four MARTA-type RPC detectors at its base, originally developed for the upgrade of the Pierre Auger Observatory, operating in avalanche mode and covering 7.3 m2 with 256 pads. The upper detector plane uses 64 scintillator bars arranged in a 32x32 matrix, providing 5x5 cm resolution over 2.6 m2. The front-end electronics utilize Altera Cyclone V FPGAs and MAROC ASICS with 64 channels, implemented both in the RPC and scintillator detectors. Five front-end units synchronize via a central control unit (CeU), for data recording and triggers. In this contribution, we will describe the CBPF hodoscope set-up and discuss some detector characterization already performed, including a complete set of Geant4 simulations developed to model the detector response to secondary cosmic rays and help validate the detector characterization. The hodoscope at CBPF is a key experimental facility to advancing WCD unit testing and characterization for SWGO.
| Collaboration(s) | SWGO Collaboration |
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