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 gammarays beyond 100 GeV, 20% for protons from 100 GeV to 1 PeV); 2) its granularity for particle identification (electron/proton separation power better than 10^-5); 3) the homogenous geometry for detecting particles arriving from every unblocked direction for large effective geometrical factor (<3 m²sr for electron and diffuse gammarays, >2 m²sr 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.

Date Published: 24 July 2014
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 9144, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 91443S (24 July 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2055319

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9144:
Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray
Tadayuki Takahashi; Jan-Willem A. den Herder; Mark Bautz, Editor(s)