Ciemat AMS Group

The AMS experiment

The AMS is a magnetic spectrometer able to identify the nuclei of Z≤26 cosmic rays and measure their energy spectrum up to TeV range. The detector is equipped with a superconducting magnet and a set of specific subdetectors for the identification and measurement of the particles.

Its construction is part of an international collaboration in which around 500 researchers from over 50 institutes in Europe, the United States and Asia are participating. The assembly and integration of the detector will be done at the CERN (Geneva) and NASA will do the installation on the ISS. The purpose of the experiment is to keep the detector operative on the ISS for 3 years.

The Ciemat group activities:

• Design and construction of the Cerenkov radiation detector for the AMS (RICH), in collaboration with the IAC (Tenerife), INFN (Bologna), LPSC (Grenoble), LIP (Lisbon), UMD (Maryland) and UNAM (Mexico).
   
  The RICH is an AMS subdetector designed to measure the speed of charged relativist particles with a 1/1000 precision and determine their electrical charge. The detector consists of a radiating material that emits Cerenkov light when traversed by charged particles going faster than the speed of light in that medium and a matrix of 680 photomultipliers that detect the radiated photons at a distance of 45 cm. The number of photons and the aperture of the cone of light are, respectively, direct measurements of particle charge and speed.
   
  The main responsibilities of the CIEMAT Group in the assembly and construction of the RICH are the acquisition and characterisation of components and fabrication of the detector's data acquisition electronics and power sources. Detector assembly will be done in a clean room at the CIEMAT.
   
  These activities are being carried out with the participation of engineering and space electronics companies outside of the CIEMAT: Carlo Gavazzi Space (Italy) for mechanical engineering and CAEN (Italy), CRISA (Spain) and CSIST (Taiwan) for manufacture of the space electronics. The space qualification tests will be conducted at the INTA (Spain).
 
• Manufacture of electronics for the AMS superconducting magnet (CAB), in collaboration with ETH (Zurich) and MIT (Boston).  
   
  The AMS magnet is made up of 14 superconducting coils that create a 0.80 T central dipole field under a 452 A current. The operating temperature of the electromagnet (1.8K) is achieved in a superfluid helium circuit.
   
  The electronics that charge and control the magnet are implemented in the CAB (Cryomagnet Avionic Box) which contains a total of 23 cards and was completely designed and manufactured by the CRISA company (Spain).
   
  The CIEMAT's responsibility in the manufacture of the magnet electronics includes the design, manufacture and testing of the power source (CCS, Cryomagnet Current Source) and the precision cryogenic temperature telemetry modules for the Magnet (PTM, Precision Telemetry Modules).

Scientific explotation of the AMS programme results on the ISS:

AMS data analysis requires the development of software packages that simulate the detector response to the passage of the particles, software packages for the determination of the physical magnitudes of interest (particle energy, direction and momentum, charge, etc.) from the detector electronic signals, and analysis programmes that model the results in different theoretical frames. 

The CIEMAT group is responsible for the RICH simulation and reconstruction software and its integration in the general AMS code.