Performance of the BACCUS Transition Radiation Detector

• Published in: Proceedings of 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference — PoS(ICRC2017)
• Main Authors: Picot-Clémente, Nicolas, Amare, Y, Anderson, T, Angelaszek, D, Anthony, N, Cheryian, K, Choi, G H, Copley, M, Coutu, S, Derome, Laurent, Eraud, Ludo, Hagenau, L, Han, J H, Huh, H G, Im, S, Jeon, J A, Jeong, S, Kim, K C, Kim, M H, Lee, H Y, Lee, J, Lee, M H, Liang, J, Link, J T, Lu, L, Lutz, L, Menchaca-Rocha, A, Mernik, T, Mitchell, J W, Mognet, S I, Morton, S, Nester, M, Nutter, S, Ofoha, O, Park, I H, Quinn, R, Seo, E S, Smith, J R, Walpole, P, Weinmann, R P, Wu, J, Yoon, Y S
• Language: English
• Published: SISSA 2017
• Subjects: Detectors and Experimental Techniques; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.301.0246; http://cds.cern.ch/record/2676810

The Boron And Carbon Cosmic rays in the Upper Stratosphere (BACCUS) balloon-borne exper-iment flew for 30 days over Antarctica in December 2016. It is the successor of the CREAMballoon program in Antarctica which recorded a total cumulative exposure of 161 days. BAC-CUS is primarily aimed to measure cosmic-ray boron and carbon fluxes at the highest energiesreachable with a balloon or satellite experiment, in order to provide essential information for abetter understanding of cosmic-ray propagation in the Galaxy. The payload is made of multipleparticle physics detectors which measure the charge up to Z=26 and energy of incident particlesfrom a few hundred GeV to a few PeV. The newly designed Transition Radiation Detector (TRD)measures signals that are a function of the charge and Lorentz factor. In April 2016, BACCUSwas taken to CERN in its flight configuration to characterize its detectors’ response to beams ofelectrons and pions. The performance of the TRD using beam test data are reported in this paper.