Simulation study of the silicon–tungsten calorimeter for ACCESS

The Advanced Cosmic-ray Composition Experiment for the Space Station (ACCESS) will perform a direct measurement of the elemental composition and energy spectra of cosmic-ray particles up to an energy of 1015 eV. The detector complement of ACCESS consists of a TRD and a ionization calorimeter, and six different concepts for the ACCESS calorimeter design alone have been proposed in the recent past. In this work, we present the structure optimization analysis and the Monte Carlo simulation results on detector performance for the silicon–tungsten (Si–W) imaging calorimeter design for ACCESS, developed as part of the NASA-sponsored mission concept and detector assessment study for this experiment.