CREAM
Collaboration:
Location of the experiment: Ballon flights from Antarctica and/or North Pole
National Responsible: P.S. Marrocchesi(Pi)
1. Goal of the experiment
CREAM (Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass) is designed to perform a direct measurement of cosmic ray composition over the elemental range from proton to iron to the supernova energy scale of 1015 eV in a series of balloon flights using the new Ultra Long Duration Balloon (ULDB) capability under development by NASA. ULDB flights are designed to last from 60 to 100 days each. The goal is to observe cosmic ray spectral features and/or abundance changes that might signify a limit to supernova acceleration
2.
Activities during 2002
During
2002, a R&D program relative to the calorimeter was carried
out within the framework of the
WCAL project, which ended in December 2002. A
Tungsten-SciFi prototype calorimeter 16 RL thick was built and
successfully tested at CERN in August 2002 with beam energies
ranging between 5 and 100 GeV. Details on the calorimeter
construction and beam test results can be found in the
proceedings of the 8th Topical Seminar on Innovative Particle and
Radiation Detectors - Siena (21-24 Oct 2002).
During the first half of 2002 we built the S2 hodoscope for the
first flight of the CREAM instrument (CREAM-1). The hodoscope was
installed in the calorimeter module at the July 2002 beam test at
CERN and then shipped to the US for the final integration in
CREAM-1.
Milestones 2003:
Commissioning and integration of the S2 hodoscope in CREAM-1 (for the first flight) | 30-06-2003 |
Construction and beam test of the calorimeter for CREAM-2 (for the second flight) | 30-12-2003 |
3. INFN contribution to the experiment in terms of manpower and financial support
· Manpower:13 researchers (6.6 FTE)
· Budget for the Year 2003: 2.1% of the CSNII budget for 2003
4. Publications in referred journals (in 2002): 1
5. Conference talks (in 2002): 4
6. Number of undergraduate and doctoral thesis on the experiment: 2
7. Leadership roles and primary responsibilities in the experiment:
Coordination of the S2 hodoscope for the first flight;
Coordination of the Calorimeter for the second flight
8. Innovative instruments
The particle charge (Z) will be
measured by a timing-based charge detector and a pixelated
silicon detector to minimize the effect of backscatter from the
calorimeter. Energy measurements will be performed by a
transition radiation detector (TRD) for Z > 3 and a sampling
tungsten/scintillator calorimeter for Z >= 1, allowing
inflight cross calibration of the two detectors. The Tungsten-SciFi
calorimeter (preceded by a Carbon target) implements an
innovative technique of light splitting to achieve a very large
dynamic range (energy measurements up to 1000 TeV).
9. Competing experiments
The Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) Balloon
experiment. Designed to measure the composition and energy
spectra of cosmic rays from ~10 GeV to near 100 TeV, the ATIC
instrument has a smaller acceptance than CREAM and a limited
exposure (each LDB flight is limited to a maximum of 3 weeks).
10. International committee which has reviewed the experiment
Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) Balloon Program Office; NASA