THE AMS EXPERIMENT
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) is a state-of-the-art particle physics detector designed to operate as an external module on the International Space Station (ISS). It makes use of the unique environment of space to study the universe and its origin by searching for antimatter and dark matter while performing precision measurements of cosmic rays composition and flux. AMS Experiment is an internal collaboration of 40 institutions from USA, Asia and Europe, represented by the United States Department of Energy (DoE) and led by the Nobel Laureate in Physics S. C. C. Ting. AMS-02 was deployed to the ISS on May 19, 2011 as part of the Space Shuttle mission STS-134. As an external payload on the ISS until at least 2024, AMS will continue to collect and analyze hundreds of millions of primary cosmic rays, with a rate of around 16 billion events per year. The AMS-02 observations will help answer fundamental questions, such as “What makes up the universe’s invisible mass?” or “What happened to the primordial antimatter?”
CIEMAT PARTICIPATION IN AMS
CIEMAT-AMS group is participating in the AMS Experiment since 1997.
In collaboration with IAC (Tenerife), INFN (Bologna), LPSC (Grenoble), LIP (Lisbon), UNAM (Mexico) and UMD (Maryland), CIEMAT-AMS group has participated in the design, construction and assembly of the Cerenkov Radiation Detector (RICH). The main responsibilities of the CIEMAT Group in the assembly and construction of the RICH were the acquisition and characterisation of components and fabrication of the detector's data acquisition electronics and power supplies. Detector assembly was done in a clean room at the CIEMAT.
CIEMAT-AMS group has actively participated in the development of simulation, reconstruction and data analysis software.
Finally, CIEMAT-AMS group is involved in several topics of data analyis, among them, the study of nuclei fluxes, light isotopes, anisotropies and searches for nuclear antimatter in cosmic rays. In addition, the group had an important role in published scientific papers such as positron fraction and proton and helium fluxes.