Speaker
Description
Space environment is a mixed environment where ions, protons and electrons coexist, with energies from a few keV to a few hundred MeV. Most radiation monitors used to measure fluxes in the space environment are based on solid-state detectors (SSD). These instruments use the total energy deposited in a sensitive volume by a particle to identify its nature and incident energy. However, protons and electrons of different energies can deposit the same amount of energy in this volume, which makes them undifferentiable and leads to data contamination. Nevertheless, such particles do not necessarily interact with matter in the same way, which leads to different tracks. Information on the distribution of the energy deposited by a particle is accessible through the transient pulse generated in the sensitive volume.
For several years, ONERA has studied the interest and feasibility of a SSD based space radiation monitor using pulse shape analysis (PSA) methods. First, this talk gives an overview of the performances of such a monitor concerning the classification and the energy regression of space environment particles. Secondly, possible sampling methods for the acquisition of the transient pulse are detailed, and the performances of these methods are compared. So far, most of these efforts have focused on electron and proton fluxes in the scope of radiation belt monitoring. Nevertheless, recent developments have extended this approach to the identification of heavy ions, for which preliminary results will be shown.
