Prototype design and performance test of a cosmic ray tracker

Abstract

Abstract The High Energy cosmic-Radiation Detection (HERD) facility has been proposed as one of the several space astronomy payloads onboard the future China’s Space Station (CSS), which is planned for operation starting around 2027 for about 10 years. A cosmic ray tracker with position resolution of better than 1 mm and effective detection area of 1 m × 1 m is designed to do detector performance study for sub-detector of the HERD on the ground. The tracker consisits of 1.0 m long scintillating fibers with a diameter of 1 mm which will be arranged in 3 staggered layers. The fibers will be read out by arrays of SiPMs. The performance of a small prototype module is built and tested with radioactive source 90-Sr and cosmic ray. The measured light output of the 3-layer fiber module is larger than 10 photoelectrons per MIP events.