Monte Carlo Simulation of HERD Calorimeter
Abstract
The High Energy cosmic-Radiation Detection (HERD) facility onboard China's Space Station is planned for operation starting around 2020 for about 10 years. It is designed as a next generation space facility focused on indirect dark matter search, precise cosmic ray spectrum and composition measurements up to the knee energy, and high energy gamma-ray monitoring and survey. The calorimeter plays an essential role in the main scientific objectives of HERD. A 3-D cubic calorimeter filled with high granularity crystals as active material is a very promising choice for the calorimeter. HERD is mainly composed of a 3-D calorimeter (CALO) surrounded by silicon trackers (TK) from all five sides except the bottom. CALO is made of 9261 cubes of LYSO crystals, corresponding to about 55 radiation lengths and 3 nuclear interaction lengths, respectively. Here the simulation results of the performance of CALO with GEANT4 and FLUKA are presented: 1) the total absorption CALO and its absorption depth for precise energy measurements (energy resolution: 1\% for electrons and gamma-rays beyond 100 GeV, 20\% for protons from 100 GeV to 1 PeV); 2) its granularity for particle identification (electron/proton separation power better than ); 3) the homogenous geometry for detecting particles arriving from every unblocked direction for large effective geometrical factor (3 for electron and diffuse gamma-rays, 2 for cosmic ray nuclei); 4) expected observational results such as gamma-ray line spectrum from dark matter annihilation and spectrum measurement of various cosmic ray chemical components.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1407.4530,
title = {Monte Carlo Simulation of HERD Calorimeter},
author = {M. Xu and G. M. Chen and Y. W. Dong and J. G. Lu and Z. Quan and L. Wang and Z. G. Wang and B. B. Wu and S. N. Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.4530},
year = {2015}
}