Speaker
Henning Gast
(RWTH Aachen)
Description
The best measurement of the cosmic ray positron flux available today was
performed by the HEAT balloon experiment more than 10 years ago. Given
the limitations in weight and power consumption for balloon experiments,
a novel approach was needed to design a detector which could increase the
existing data by more than a factor of 100.
Using silicon photomultipliers for the readout of a scintillating fiber tracker
and of an imaging electromagnetic calorimeter, the PEBS detector features a
large geometrical acceptance of 4000 cm^2 sr, a total weight of 1500 kg and a
power consumption of 900 W . The experiment is intended to measure cosmic
ray particle spectra for a period of up to 20 days at an altitude of 40 km
circulating the North or South Pole.
A full Geant 4 simulation of the detector concept has been developed and key
elements have been verified in a testbeam in October 2006 at CERN.
Author
Henning Gast
(RWTH Aachen)
