Antiparticle identification studies for the PAMELA satellite experiment

Abstract: The PAMELA satellite experiment will soon be launched and during its 3 year mission perform measurement of charged particle fluxes in the cosmic radiation. PAMELA is specifically designed to identify antiprotons and positrons in the vast background of other charged particles. These antiparticle measurements will be performed using: a permanent magnet spectrometer, a scintillator based time of flight system, an electromagnetic imaging calorimeter, a transition radiation detector and a scintillator triggered neutron detector. There is also a scintillator based anticoincidence system to reject spurious triggers from out of acceptance events (developed and built at KTH). These detectors will allow the background in the antiproton and positron measurements to be significantly reduced, and PAMELA will thus be able to perform high precision measurements with unprecedented statistics and over a wide energy range, far surpassing any previous experiment. To determine the antiparticle identification and background rejection capability of the experiment, studies have been performed using simulations and data collected at particle beams. These studies have focused on: the proton rejection in positron measurements (using the calorimeter), contamination by locally produced pions in antiproton measurements and estimations of the expected statistics due to the energy dependence (caused by e.g. the geomagnetic field and the magnetic field in the spectrometer) of the gathering power. This work significantly extends previous studies of the PAMELA performance in antiparticle identification.