On 25 August 2018, a G3-class geomagnetic storm reached the Earth’s magnetosphere, causing a transient rearrangement of the charged particle environment around the planet, which was detected by the High-Energy Particle Detector (HEPD) on board the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES-01). We found that the count rates of electrons in the MeV range were characterized by a depletion during the storm’s main phase and a clear enhancement during the recovery caused by large substorm activity, with the key role played by auroral processes mapped into the outer belt. A post-storm rate increase was localized at L-shells immediately above ∼3 and mostly driven by non-adiabatic local acceleration caused by possible resonant interaction with low-frequency magnetospheric waves.
New measurements at a centre-of-mass energy GeV of the hadronic photon structure function Fγ2(x) in the Q2 interval, 9 GeV2 ≤Q2≤30 GeV2, are presented. The data, collected in 1997 with the L3 detector, correspond to an integrated luminosity of 51.9 pb−1. Combining with the data taken at a centre-of-mass energy of 91 GeV, the evolution of Fγ2 with Q2 is measured in the Q2 range from 1.2 GeV2 to 30 GeV2. Fγ2 shows a linear growth with lnQ2; the value of the slope α−1dFγ2(Q2)/dlnQ2 is measured in two x bins from 0.01 to 0.2 and is somewhat higher than predicted.
The doubling of the angle of beam deflection due to volume reflection of protons by a sequence of two bent silicon crystals was experimentally observed at the 400 GeV proton beam of the CERN SPS. A similar sequence of short bent crystals can be used as an efficient primary collimator for the Large Hadron Collider
Time-dependent energy spectra of galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) carry crucial information regarding their origin and propagation throughout the interstellar environment. When observed at the Earth, after traversing the interplanetary medium, such spectra are heavily affected by the solar wind and the embedded solar magnetic field permeating the inner sectors of the heliosphere. The activity of the Sun changes significantly over an 11 yr solar cycle—and so does the effect on cosmic particles; this translates into a phenomenon called solar modulation. Moreover, GCR spectra during different epochs of solar activity provide invaluable information for a complete understanding of the plethora of mechanisms taking place in various layers of the Sun’s atmosphere and how they evolve over time. The High-Energy Particle Detector (HEPD-01) has been continuously collecting data since 2018 August, during the quiet phase between solar cycles 24 and 25; the activity of the Sun is slowly but steadily rising and is expected to peak around 2025/2026. In this paper, we present the first spectra for ∼50–250 MeV galactic protons measured by the HEPD-01 instrument—placed on board the CSES-01 satellite—from 2018 August to 2022 March over a one-Carrington-rotation time basis. Such data are compared to the ones from other spaceborne experiments, present (e.g., EPHIN, Parker Solar Probe) and past (PAMELA), and to a state-of-the-art three-dimensional model describing the GCRs propagation through the heliosphere.
31 December 2019 in Superconductor Science and Technology
In the frame of a collaboration between CERN, ASI, University of Trento, and TIFPA, the HTS demonstrator magnet for space project has started to define methods and procedures for manufacturing high temperature superconducting magnets for space applications. To this purpose, we developed a conceptual design of a superconducting magnetic spectrometer for a physics experiment in space. The configuration is a toroid with twelve superconducting coils based on ReBCO tape. By using ReBCO tape with an engineering critical current density, Je, exceeding 1000 A mm−2 at and , as reached in the H2020-ARIES program, the magnet system provides an average bending strength of . This is sufficient to measure charged particles with rigidities up to , more than two orders of magnitude higher than the present state-of-the-art space spectrometer. The magnet system requires about of ReBCO tape and produces a peak magnetic field of at an operating temperature of . A small scale single coil, which is about one third in size of a coil from the toroidal magnet system, will be manufactured and tested as demonstrator of the magnet technology. The mechanical structure and performance of the toroidal magnet system and demonstrator coil are described.
The radiation belts in the Earth’s magnetosphere pose a hazard to satellite systems and spacecraft missions (both manned and unmanned), heavily affecting payload design and resources, thus resulting in an impact on the overall mission performance and final costs. The NASA AE9/AP9/SPM radiation models for energetic electrons, protons, and plasma provide useful information on the near-Earth environment, but they are still incomplete as to some features and, for some energy ranges, their predictions are not based on a statistically sufficient sample of direct measurements. Therefore, it is of the upmost importance to provide new data and direct measurements to improve their output. In this work, the AP9 model is applied to the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES-01) orbit to estimate the flux of energetic protons over the South Atlantic Anomaly during a short testing period of one day, 1 January 2021. Moreover, a preliminary comparison with proton data obtained from the High-Energy Particle Detector (HEPD) on board CSES-01 is carried out. This estimation will serve as the starting ground for a forthcoming complete data analysis, enabling extensive testing and validation of current theoretical and empirical models.