Satellite experiments for gamma-ray and cosmic-ray detection employ plastic scintillators to discriminate charged from neutral particles in order to correctly identify gamma-rays and charged nuclei. ...The High Energy Cosmic Radiation Detection (HERD) facility will be among these experiments, to be installed onboard the future Chinese Space Station (CSS), to detect cosmic-rays and gamma-rays up to TeV energies. The plastic scintillator detector (PSD) will consist of scintillator tiles or bars coupled to Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs). To discriminate gamma-rays from charged particles and measure the ion charge up to iron nuclei a wide dynamic range is required, from few tens up to thousands of photoelectrons. We have equipped a plastic scintillator tile prototype with SiPMs produced by Hamamatsu and AdvanSiD and coupled their analog signals to the DT5550W board based on the CITIROC ASIC, produced by CAEN SpA. The CITIROC ASIC allows both the formation of a fast trigger with a configurable threshold and the digitization of analog waveforms after a preamplification and shaping stage along two paths with different gain settings. The performance of our prototype will be shown.
Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) are excellent devices to detect the faint and short Cherenkov light emitted in high energy atmospheric showers, and therefore suitable for use in imaging air ...Cherenkov Telescopes. The high density Near Ultraviolet Violet SiPMs (NUV-HD3) produced by Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) in collaboration with INFN were used to equip optical modules for a possible upgrade of the Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope camera prototype, in the framework of the Cherenkov Telescope Array project. SiPMs are 6×6 mm
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devices based on 40×40 μm
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microcells optimized for photo-detection at the NUV wavelengths. More than 40 optical modules, each composed by a 4×4 array of SiPMs, were assembled. In this contribution we report on the development and on the assembly of the optical modules, their validation and integration in the camera.
The third generation of Near Ultraviolet High Density (NUV-HD3) Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) produced by Fondazione Bruno Kessler in collaboration with Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare ...(INFN) have been tested and characterized in INFN laboratories. Arrays of 16 pixels have been assembled to equip the focal plane of the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Medium Size Telescope (pSCT) proposed for the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory. Each camera module is composed by 4 matrices of 16-pixel optical units coupled with TARGET-7 ASIC front-end electronics for signal amplification and digitization. A total of 9 modules have been successfully integrated on the pSCT camera and are currently taking data. In this contribution we provide a summary of the performances of the HD3 technology as measured in the INFN laboratories. We also report on the laboratory tests performed on the assembled optical units, showing their performances and homogeneity in terms of gain, signal-to-noise ratio and dark count rate.
The Extreme Energy Events Project is a synchronous sparse array of 52 tracking detectors for studying High Energy Cosmic Rays (HECR) and Cosmic Rays-related phenomena. The observatory is also meant ...to address Long Distance Correlation (LDC) phenomena: the network is deployed over a broad area covering 10 degrees in latitude and 11 in longitude. An overview of a set of preliminary results is given, extending from the study of local muon flux dependance on solar activity to the investigation of the upward-going component of muon flux traversing the EEE stations; from the search for anisotropies at the sub-TeV scale to the hints for observations of km-scale Extensive Air Shower (EAS).
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