Searching for TeV cosmic electrons with the CREST experiment

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The Cosmic Ray Electron Synchrotron Telescope (CREST) high-altitude balloon experiment is a pathfinding effort to detect for the first time multi-TeV cosmic-ray electrons. Such would be the markers of nearby cosmic accelerators, as energetic electrons from distant Galactic sources are expected to be depleted by radiative losses during interstellar transport. Electrons will be detected indirectly by the characteristic signature of their geomagnetic synchrotron losses, in the form of a burst of coaligned x-ray photons intersecting the plane of the instrument. Since the primary electron itself need not traverse the payload, an effective detection area is achieved that is several times the nominal 6.4 m2 instrument. The payload is composed of an array of 1024 BaF2 crystals surrounded by a set of veto scintillator detectors. A long-duration balloon flight in Antarctica is planned for the 2011-12 season.

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    Citation Excerpt :

    The satellite experiment Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) run in 1991–1999 employed a typical particle detector, namely a spark chamber, and gave rise to a catalogue of cosmic sources that emit high-energetic gamma rays (Hartmann et al., 1999; see Fig. 5). The balloon experiment Cosmic Ray Electron Synchrotron Telescope (CREST) run in 2009 employed a fluorescence detector in order to measure the photons of the synchrotron radiation produced by cosmic electrons in the atmosphere (Coutu et al., 2011; SratoCat, 2009). Earthbound experiments with neutrino telescopes like ICECUBE stand in the tradition of the search for neutrino oscillations with KAMIOKANDE and its followers (Zuber, 2012; Katz and Spiering, 2012).

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