Calibration of the DAMPE Plastic Scintillator Detector and its on-orbit performance

TL;DR

This paper details the calibration process of DAMPE's Plastic Scintillator Detector on orbit, ensuring high efficiency in detecting and discriminating high-energy cosmic-ray particles.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive on-orbit calibration procedure and a charge reconstruction method for the PSD detector in space-based cosmic-ray experiments.

Findings

Detection efficiency of each PSD strip exceeds 99.5%

Total efficiency for charged particles exceeds 99.99%

Calibration steps effectively improve detector performance

Abstract

DArk Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) is a space-borne apparatus for detecting the high-energy cosmic-rays like electrons, $\gamma$-rays, protons and heavy-ions. Plastic Scintillator Detector (PSD) is the top-most sub-detector of the DAMPE. The PSD is designed to measure the charge of incident high-energy particles and it also serves as a veto detector for discriminating $\gamma$-rays from charged particles. In this paper, PSD on-orbit calibration procedure is described, which includes five steps of pedestal, dynode correlation, response to minimum-ionizing particles (MIPs), light attenuation function and energy reconstruction. A method for reconstructing the charge of incident high energy cosmic-ray particles is introduced. The detection efficiency of each PSD strip is verified to be above 99.5%, the total efficiency of the PSD for charged particles is above 99.99%.