Results of 2007 test beam of AMS-02 Electromagnetic Calorimeter Original Research Article

The AMS-02 experiment will be delivered by the Space Shuttle Discovery to the ISS in summer 2010. The main goals of the experiment are search for antimatter and dark matter, high precision measurement of charged cosmic ray spectra and fluxes and study of gamma rays, in the GeV to TeV energy range. In AMS-02 the Electromagnetic Calorimeter (ECAL) is required to measure image and gamma energy and to discriminate electromagnetic showers from hadronic cascades. ECAL is based on a lead/scintillating fiber sandwich, providing a 3D imaging reconstruction of the showers. The electronics equipping the detector has low power consumption, low noise, large dynamic range readout and full double redundancy. The calorimeter successfully got through several space qualification tests concerning the mechanical and thermal stability, the electromagnetic compatibility and radiation hardness. The ECAL Flight Model was calibrated during Summer 2007 in a test beam at CERN, using 6–250 GeV electron and proton beams: angular and energy resolutions, obtained from these data, are reported.