福家 英之

Recent direct measurements of the energy spectra of the charged cosmic ray have revealed unexpected spectral features, most notably the onset of a progressive hardening at few hundreds of GeV/n not only of proton and He spectra but also observable for heavier nuclei. Thus, the study of the spectra behavior of heavy elements may shed light on understanding propagation and acceleration phenomena in our Galaxy. In particular, Fe and Ni provide favorable conditions for observations thanks to the low background contamination from spallation of higher mass elements they are affected by. The CALorimetric Electron Telescope, CALET, has been measuring high-energy cosmic rays on the International Space Station since October 2015. The instrument consists of two layers of segmented plastic scintillators, a 3 radiation length thick tungsten-scintillating fiber imaging calorimeter and a 27 radiation length thick PWO calorimeter. It identifies the charge of individual elements up to Ni and beyond and it measures the energy of cosmic-ray nuclei providing a direct measurement of their spectra. In this contribution, the iron and nickel spectra, resulted after 5 years of data acquisition, are presented in the energy range between 10 and 2000 GeV/n and between 8.8 and 240 GeV/n, respectively. The analysis procedure and the assessment of systematic errors are detailed, in addition to the ratio between the two fluxes. Both spectra show similar shape and energy dependence.

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.211001.

The General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) is a balloon-borne experiment that aims to measure low-energy cosmicray antiparticles. GAPS has developed a new antiparticle identification technique based on exotic atom formation caused by incident particles, which is achieved by ten layers of Si(Li) detector tracker in GAPS. The conventional analysis uses the physical quantities of the reconstructed incident and secondary particles. In parallel with this, we have developed a complementary approach based on deep neural networks. This paper presents a new convolutional neural network (CNN) technique. A three-dimensional CNN takes energy depositions as three-dimensional inputs and learns to identify their positional/energy correlations. The combination of the physical quantities and the CNN technique is also investigated. The findings show that the new technique outperforms existing machine learning-based methods in particle identification.

This study developed a novel thermal control system to cool detectors of the General AntiParticle Spectrometer (GAPS) before its flights. GAPS is a balloon-borne cosmic-ray observation experiment. In its payload, GAPS contains over 1000 silicon detectors that must be cooled below −40℃. All detectors are thermally coupled to a unique heat-pipe system (HPS) that transfers heat from the detectors to a radiator. The radiator is designed to be cooled below −50℃ during the flight by exposure to space. The pre-flight state of the detectors is checked on the ground at 1 atm and ambient room temperature, but the radiator cannot be similarly cooled. The authors have developed a ground cooling system (GCS) to chill the detectors for ground testing. The GCS consists of a cold plate, a chiller, and insulating foam. The cold plate is designed to be attached to the radiator and cooled by a coolant pumped by the chiller. The payload configuration, including the HPS, can be the same as that of the flight. The GCS design was validated by thermal tests using a scale model. The GCS design is simple and provides a practical guideline, including a simple estimation of appropriate thermal insulation thickness, which can be easily adapted to other applications.

We present the measurement of the energy dependence of the boron flux in cosmic rays and its ratio to the carbon flux in an energy interval from 8.4 GeV/n to 3.8 TeV/n based on the data collected by the Calorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) during ∼6.4 yr of operation on the International Space Station. An update of the energy spectrum of carbon is also presented with an increase in statistics over our previous measurement. The observed boron flux shows a spectral hardening at the same transition energy E0∼200 GeV/n of the C spectrum, though B and C fluxes have different energy dependences. The spectral index of the B spectrum is found to be γ=-3.047±0.024 in the interval 25<E<200 GeV/n. The B spectrum hardens by ΔγB=0.25±0.12, while the best fit value for the spectral variation of C is ΔγC=0.19±0.03. The B/C flux ratio is compatible with a hardening of 0.09±0.05, though a single power-law energy dependence cannot be ruled out given the current statistical uncertainties. A break in the B/C ratio energy dependence would support the recent AMS-02 observations that secondary cosmic rays exhibit a stronger hardening than primary ones. We also perform a fit to the B/C ratio with a leaky-box model of the cosmic-ray propagation in the Galaxy in order to probe a possible residual value λ0 of the mean escape path length λ at high energy. We find that our B/C data are compatible with a nonzero value of λ0, which can be interpreted as the column density of matter that cosmic rays cross within the acceleration region.