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Abstract

A scintillating optical fiber calorimeter (SOFCAL) is being developed by NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center for use in balloon-borne emulsion chambers to study the spectrum of high-energy cosmic rays and gamma rays. SOFCAL will not saturate for long exposures, and the detector will be helpful for the study of primary cosmic-ray nuclei energies from 100 GeV to 1,000 TeV. For a given incident particle and energy, computer simulations of electromagnetic cascades allow computation of energy deposited in different regions of the calorimeter. For these initial simulations, a 5-cm x 5-cm x 7-cm calorimeter was used. Each subsection contained a 0.4-cm thick lead plate or two 0.2-cm lead plates and two layers of optical fibers, 90° to each other. There were 100 square fibers in a layer, and the length of an edge was 0.5 mm. For incident gamma ray energies of 0.5 to 1.5 TeV, the energy deposited in each layer of fibers was computed. Due to the limited dynamic range of the imaging electronics, a window for the energy deposition (SigmaEgamma) in the fibers was explored to determine the best measure of energy deposition in the calorimeter.

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