Energy Calibration of CALET Onboard the International Space Station

TL;DR

This paper details the calibration methods for CALET's calorimeter on the ISS, ensuring precise energy measurements of cosmic rays across a wide dynamic range for accurate electron spectrum analysis.

Contribution

It introduces calibration techniques for CALET's calorimeter that achieve high accuracy over a six-order magnitude dynamic range, enabling precise cosmic ray energy measurements.

Findings

Calibration accuracy meets resolution requirements

Seamless gain range transitions achieved

Energy measurement precision validated

Abstract

In August 2015, the CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET), designed for long exposure observations of high energy cosmic rays, docked with the International Space Station (ISS) and shortly thereafter began tocollect data. CALET will measure the cosmic ray electron spectrum over the energy range of 1 GeV to 20 TeV with a very high resolution of 2% above 100 GeV, based on a dedicated instrument incorporating an exceptionally thick 30 radiation-length calorimeter with both total absorption and imaging (TASC and IMC) units. Each TASC readout channel must be carefully calibrated over the extremely wide dynamic range of CALET that spans six orders of magnitude in order to obtain a degree of calibration accuracy matching the resolution of energy measurements. These calibrations consist of calculating the conversion factors between ADC units and energy deposits, ensuring linearity over each gain range, and providing a seamless transition between neighboring gain ranges. This paper describes these calibration methods in detail, along with the resulting data and associated accuracies. The results presented in this paper show that a sufficient accuracy was achieved for the calibrations of each channel in order to obtain a suitable resolution over the entire dynamic range of the electron spectrum measurement.