Dresden 2013 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 113: Experimentelle Techniken der Astroteilchenphysik 6

T 113.3: Talk

Thursday, March 7, 2013, 17:25–17:40, HSZ-101

Identification of positrons and electrons in AMS-02 experiment — •Valerio Vagelli, Wim De Boer, Iris Gebauer, Melanie Heil, and Stefan Zeissler — KIT, Karlsruhe, DE

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer AMS-02 is a large acceptance cosmic ray detector which has been installed on the International Space Station ISS in May 2011, where it will continue to measure the fluxes of cosmic rays up to TeV energies for more than 10 years. A primary cosmic ray research topic is the indirect search for Dark Matter DM in the positron channel. Several experiments have shown a rise in the positron against electron ratio for energies above 10 GeV, which can be interpreted as a signal from DM annihilation. However, astrophysical hypothesis such as local pulsar can also explain this feature. In order to resolve the contribution of the different sources, highly accurate data in the GeV to TeV energy range are required. AMS-02 is exploring spectra in this energy range, to extend the actual status of research. An important systematic for this measurement is the subtraction of the background in the positron sample, which comes from different sources. The dominant background sources are misidentified protons and electrons with wrongly assigned charge sign. This presentation introduces a data based background subtraction method, which discriminates between different sources of background and allows to have a good estimation of background substraction systematics for the electron/positron ratio measurement.