AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) is a broad international collaboration involving around 500 researchers from 56 institutes in 16 countries operating a cosmic-ray observatory installed on the International Space Station (ISS). ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) are two of the main supporting organizations for the experiment. AMS-02 is a particle detector designed to directly detect the cosmic-ray particles arriving at Earth vivinity from the Universe. Its main goals are to perform a detailed measurement of the cosmic-ray spectrum, to search for cosmological antimatter and to search for dark matter. The whole set of AMS subdetectors allow to identify a large particle spectrum up to the iron element region. The long exposure time together with its large acceptance will enable to collect an unprecedented statistics, up to the date of March 2015 more than 61 000 million events were acquired. The AMS/LIP group actively took part in the experiment conception and construction with a particular relevance in the Ring Imaging Cerenkov detector (RICH). The AMS detector assembly was done partialy in different laboratories and the final integration took place at CERN (CERN Européenne pour la Research Nucleare) in a dedicated clean room in 2010. The detector was subsequently tested at CERN with proton and electron beams and transported at the end of August to NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) where it underwent the final testing procedures before its launch aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour mission STS-134. AMS was successfully installed on 19th May 2011 in the ISS and started data taking on the 21st May. The AMS experiment, unique in the current astroparticle physics scenario, creates a unique window of opportunity to embrace a huge scientific challenge and constitutes an excellent training platform for graduate studies. The experiment is expected to be carried out in Space for a period equal to the foreseen Space Station lifetime (at least up to 2020) collecting in a continuous rate of approximately 40 million events per day. The work of the Portuguese group is centered on AMS data analysis and in the contril and performance studies of the RICH subdetector and reconstruction algorithms for velocity and charge of cosmic-ray particles. This group also embraces the study of the solar modulation effect in cosmic rays and will focus on the proton and electron fluxes study at low energu (up to 100 GeV), as well as on its time variability study. Another research topic is the isotopic separation and the light isotope spectra study.

Photos

Contacts

Group Leader:  

Fernando Barão

barao@lip.pt