Speaker
Dr
Philip von Doetinchem
(UC Berkeley, Space Sciences Laboratory)
Description
The GAPS experiment is foreseen to carry out a dark matter search using low energy cosmic ray antideuterons (< 0.3GeV/n) at stratospheric altitudes using a novel detection approach. The theoretically predicted antideuteron flux resulting from secondary interactions of primary cosmic rays, e.g. protons, with the interstellar medium is very low. So far not a single cosmic antideuteron has been detected by any experiment. Therefore a crucial task during the development of the GAPS instrument is to gain a good understanding of the large gamma and particle backgrounds which could spoil the antideuteron identification. This background is mainly composed of three components: cosmic rays, products of cosmic-ray interactions with Earth's atmosphere and products of interactions with the detector material itself. To study atmospheric interactions of cosmic rays with the atmosphere an adapted Geant4 based Planetocosmics simulation was developed. In addition, the Planetocosmics framework was also used to study the geomagnetic influence on the background rates. The results of these simulations were fed into a standalone Geant4 instrument simulation which is used to carry out a full GAPS detector simulation and reconstruction.
This presentation will give an overview of the GAPS instrument and the different simulation issues. It will mainly concentrate on the atmospheric simulations and discuss e.g. the implementation of the particle gun for a fast simulation, validation of the simulations with existing data and the interface to the instrument simulation.
Primary author
Dr
Philip von Doetinchem
(UC Berkeley, Space Sciences Laboratory)
Co-authors
Atsushi TAKADA
(Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency)
Charles HAILEY
(Columbia University, Astronomy and Astrophysics)
Florian GAHBAUER
(University of Latvia, Atomic and Molecular Physics Laboratory)
Hideyuki FUKE
(Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency)
Isaac MOGNET
(UC Los Angeles, Physics and Astronomy)
Jason KOGLIN
(Columbia University, Astronomy and Astrophysics)
Jeffrey ZWEERINK
(UC Los Angeles, Physics and Astronomy)
Kaya MORI
(Columbia University, Astronomy and Astrophysics)
Nobutaka BANDO
(Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency)
Norm MADDEN
(Columbia University, Astronomy and Astrophysics)
Rene ONG
(UC Los Angeles, Physics and Astronomy)
Steven BOGGS
(UC Berkeley, Space Sciences Laboratory)
Tetsuya YOSHIDA
(Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency)
Tracy ZHANG
(UC Los Angeles, Physics and Astronomy)
Tsuguo ARAMAKI
(Columbia University, Astronomy and Astrophysics)
William CRAIG
(Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)