SPACE AND COSMIC RAY PHYSICS SEMINAR

University of Maryland
Atlantic Building, Room 2400 4:30 PM Monday, February 9, 2009
Coffee, Tea & Snacks 4:15-4:30 PM

Alexander Malinin
University of Maryland

A New Transition Radiation Detector for the CREAM experiment

The Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass (CREAM) experiment is designed to investigate the source, propagation and acceleration mechanism of high energy cosmic-ray nuclei, by directly measuring their energy and charge. Incorporating a Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) provides an energy measurement complementary to the calorimeter, as well as additional track reconstruction capability. A new TRD design provides a compact, robust, reliable, low density detector to measure incident nucleus energy for 3 < Z < 26 nuclei in the Lorentz gamma factor range of 102-105. Design, construction and tests of the new TRD as well as the low-power front end electronics used to achieve the large dynamic range required will be presented. Beam test results of a prototype TRD in the CERN SPS secondary hadron and electron beam will be reported.

Sponsored by: Department of Physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, University of Maryland. For information visit the UMD Space Physics group seminar web site at https://space.umd.edu/seminars/.