The GAPS Time-of-Flight Detector

GAPS Collaboration

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

The General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) Antarctic long duration balloon mission is scheduled for launch during the austral summer of 2024-25. Its novel detection technique, based on exotic atom formation, excitation, and decay, is specifically designed for the detection of slow moving cosmic antiprotons and antideuterons. Such antinuclei are predicted by a wide variety of allowed dark matter models, as well as other astrophysical theories like primordial black holes. There are two main components of the GAPS instrument: a large-area tracker and a surrounding time-of-flight system (TOF). The combination of these two systems allows GAPS to effectively differentiate between species of negatively-charged antinuclei and determine the energy deposition, velocity, and trajectory of particles interacting with the detector. This contribution will focus on the TOF, which determines the velocity of the incoming antiparticle and provides the trigger to the experiment. We will give an overview of the TOF detector, an explanation of relevant electronics, and a report on its construction and preliminary performance. The TOF is composed of 160 thin plastic scintillator paddles ranging in length from 1.5 to 1.8 meters. At each paddle end, signals from six silicon photomultipliers are combined to produce two copies of the resulting waveform: one to form the trigger and one for data readout. This design is optimized for low mass and fast data acquisition while still maintaining good light collection.

Original languageEnglish
Article number120
JournalProceedings of Science
Volume444
StatePublished - Sep 27 2024
Event38th International Cosmic Ray Conference, ICRC 2023 - Nagoya, Japan
Duration: Jul 26 2023Aug 3 2023

Funding

This work is supported in the U.S. by the NASA APRA program (Grant Nos. NNX17AB44G, NNX17AB46G, and NNX17AB47G), in Japan by the JAXA/ISAS Small Science Program FY2017, and in Italy by Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) through the ASI INFN agreement No. 2018-22-HH.0: \u201CPartecipazione italiana al GAPS - General AntiParticle Spectrometer.\u201D H. Fuke is supported by JSPS KAKENHI grants (JP17H01136, JP19H05198, and JP22H00147) and Mitsubishi Foundation Research Grant 2019-10038. The contributions of C. Gerrity are supported by NASA under award No. 80NSSC19K1425 of the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) program. R. A. Ong receives support from the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences. K. Perez and M. Xiao are supported by Heising-Simons award 2018-0766. Y. Shimizu receives support from JSPS KAKENHI grant JP20K04002 and Sumitomo Foundation Grant No. 180322. M. Yamatani receives support from JSPS KAKENHI grant JP22K14065. K. Yee is supported through the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant 2141064. S. Feldman is supported through the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant 2034835.

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