AMS-100 is the next-generation high-energy cosmic-ray experiment in Space. It is designed as a magnetic spectrometer with a geometrical acceptance of 100 m² · sr to be operated for ten years at the Sun–Earth Lagrange Point 2. Its Time-of-Flight (TOF) detector is a crucial sub-detector for the main trigger and the particle identification constructed from individual scintillation counters. A fast time measurement with a resolution of 20 ps for a single counter is required to cover wide energy ranges for particle identification. A prototype counter has been designed based on a fast plastic scintillator tile readout by two silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs). An amplifier board was built to merge 16 SiPM channels into four readout channels in a hybrid connection. The signals are read out by a fast waveform digitizer. The timing performance was studied with electrons from a ⁹⁰Sr source. A time resolution of 40 ps for a single counter has been achieved. Various operational and environmental conditions have been studied.

The magnetic spectrometer AMS-100, which includes a superconducting coil, is designed to measure cosmic rays and detect cosmic antimatter in space. This extreme environment requires a suitable sensing solution to monitor critical changes in the structure such as the beginning of a quench in the superconducting coil. Rayleigh-scattering-based distributed optical fibre sensors (DOFS) fulfil the high requirements for these extreme conditions but require precise calibration of the temperature and strain coefficients of the optical fibre. Therefore, the fibre-dependent strain and temperature coefficients $K_{\mathrm{T}}$ and $K_{ϵ}$ for the temperature range from 77 K to 353 K were investigated in this study. The fibre was integrated into an aluminium tensile test sample with well-calibrated strain gauges to determine the fibre’s $K_{ϵ}$ independently of its Young’s modulus. Simulations were used to validate that the strain caused by changes in temperature or mechanical conditions was the same in the optical fibre as in the aluminium test sample. The results indicated a linear temperature dependence of $K_{ϵ}$ and a non-linear temperature dependence of $K_{\mathrm{T}}$. With the parameters presented in this work, it was possible to accurately determine the strain or temperature of an aluminium structure over the entire temperature range from 77 K to 353 K using the DOFS.

In this paper, a new measurement principle for decoupling mechanical and thermal signals in an OFDR measurement with integrated optical fibres is investigated. Previous methods for decoupling require additional measuring equipment or knowledge about the substrate properties. This new method is based solely on simultaneous measurements of two fibres with different temperature sensitivities resulting from different core doping processes. By exposing both fibres to the same thermal and mechanical load, the signal could be differentiated through the signal variations caused by the thermo-optical effect. The two fibres used in the tests have a sufficient response difference in the cryogenic temperature range. Therefore, the method is suitable for various applications, such as high-temperature superconductors as well as cryogenic and space applications.

Thallium-doped sodium iodide (NaI(Tl)) scintillation detectors play an important role in the field of direct dark matter (DM) searches. The DAMA/LIBRA experiment stands out for its reported observation of an annually modulating DM-like signal, which is in direct contrast with other results. To accurately calibrate the energies of nuclear recoil signals with electron recoils, precise measurements of the quenching factor of the NaI(Tl) crystals are essential, as the two processes have different scintillation light yield. In this article, we present results of a systematic study carried out by the COSINUS collaboration and Duke University to measure the quenching factor of sodium (Na) recoils as a function of nuclear recoil energy and for differing Thallium (Tl) dopant concentrations in the bulk crystal. Five ultrapure NaI(Tl) crystals, manufactured by the Shanghai Institute for Ceramics, were irradiated with a quasi-monoenergetic neutron beam at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, North Carolina, USA. The quenching factor for nuclear recoils off Na with low energies of 6–26keV $$_{\text {nr}}$$ nr was extracted for all crystals, using two proportional calibration schemas with lines from a $$^{241}$$ 241 Am source and a $$^{133}$$ 133 Ba source. A Tl-dependence could be deduced in both cases, where a lower Tl concentration leads to smaller observed QF.