Development of a novel imaging calorimeter for gamma-ray and cosmic ray studies.

We propose to develop an accelerator beam-test instrument to demonstrate the performance of a new type of imaging calorimeter aimed at a future gamma-ray/cosmic-ray mission. The proposal would fund the development, construction and evaluation of a prototype instrument with 150mm×150mm active area and consisting of 4 layers of scintillating fiber x-y trackers, and 4 layers of CsI:Na crystal read out by wavelength shifting (WLS) optical fibers. The prototype would be instrumented with silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) photodetectors and custom electronics, utilizing low power analog pipeline digitizers designed by the U. Hawaii group. Calibrations would be performed using accelerator runs at both tagged photon beam facilities and a heavy ion accelerator. This project is aimed at advancing the technical readiness level of the key detector technologies for a future MIDEX (or probe-class) mission concept known as the Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope (APT). The instrument design was driven by the requirements of gamma-ray searches for dark matter (requiring a pair telescope with an order of magnitude improvement in geometry factor compared to Fermi LAT) and prompt localization of gamma-ray transients such as the counterparts of gravitational-wave sources/neutron-star mergers (best accomplished by a very large-area Compton telescope). A Sun–Earth Lagrange orbit would remove Earth obscuration providing the largest instantaneous field of view, but would require the use of a relatively thin imaging calorimeter with a depth limited to <6 radiation lengths. The same instrument design would provide multiple differential ionization energy loss (dE/dx) cosmic-ray measurements over a very large area, with a very deep detector. Such an instrument would be a powerful cosmic-ray detector capable of measuring the elemental abundances of very rare, ultra-heavy r-process cosmic ray nuclei for material originating outside our solar system, connecting to the n-star merger science. With the addition of foam radiators, the CsI detectors could detect the transition radiation X-rays from very-high-energy light cosmic rays, specifically Boron and Carbon, needed to differentiate models of cosmic-ray propagation of importance to indirect dark matter detection. The APT detector design would incorporate 20 layers of 5 mm thick CsI:Na with crossed wavelength shifting fiber (WLS fiber) readout, interspersed with 20 x−y scintillating optical fiber tracker (SOFT) layers using interleaved 1.5mm round scintillating fibers. The 3m×3m×2.5m detector volume consisting of passive plastic scintillating fibers and CsI crystals would be read out on the sides with SiPM photodetectors and analog-pipeline waveform digitizers. These electronics would provide adequate look-back time to include signals from the relatively slow CsI detectors in the trigger; achieving this capability within the power budget constitutes another major activity of the proposed research. Ultimately, this work would validate simulation studies that indicate that the APT instrument could achieve 10 times the sensitivity of the Fermi LAT for GeV–TeV gamma-rays, and provide more than an order of magnitude improvement in sensitivity over any other proposed gamma-ray experiment in the MeV energy range with gravitational wave source localization to better than 1 degree uncertainty. Likewise, the cosmic-ray detector would improve statistics on rare heavy elements and high-energy lighter nuclei by orders of magnitude compared to any extant experiment.

The Astrophysics Research and Analysis program (APRA) supports suborbital and suborbital-class investigations, development of detectors and supporting technology, laboratory astrophysics, and limited ground-based observing. Basic research proposals in these areas are solicited for investigations that are relevant to NASA's programs in astronomy and astrophysics, including the entire range of photons, gravitational waves, and particle astrophysics. The emphasis of this solicitation is on technologies and investigations that advance NASA astrophysics missions and goals.

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