Study of linearity of LYSO crystal for the high energy cosmic radiation detection (HERD) facility

Abstract

The high energy cosmic-radiation detection (HERD) facility is a space mission designed for detecting cosmic ray (CR) electrons, $$\gamma $$ -rays up to tens of TeV and CR nuclei from proton to iron up to several PeV. The main instrument of HERD is a 3-D imaging calorimeter (CALO) composed of nearly ten thousand lutetium yttrium orthosilicate (LYSO, with cerium doping) crystal cubes. A large dynamic range of single HERD CALO Cell (HCC) is necessary to achieve HERD’s PeV observation objectives, which means that the response of HCC should maintain a good linearity from minimum ionizing particle (MIP) calibration to PeV shower maximum. In order to study the linearity of HCC over such a large energy range, a beam test has been implemented at the E2 and E3 beam lines of BEPC. High intensity pulsed electron beam provided by E2 line is used for producing high energy density within HCC; $$\pi ^{+}$$ /proton provided by E3 line are used for HCC calibration. The results show that no saturation effect occurs and the linearity of HCC is better than 10% from 30 MeV (1 MIP) to $$1.1\times 10^{3}$$ TeV (energy density is 93 TeV/cm $$^{3})$$ , which can meet the requirement mentioned above.