The High Energy cosmic-Radiation Detection (HERD) facility is one of several space astronomy payloads of the cosmic lighthouse program onboard China's Space Station, which is planned for operation starting around 2020 for about 10 years. The main scientific objectives of HERD are indirect dark matter search, precise cosmic ray spectrum and composition measurements up to the knee energy, and high energy gamma-ray monitoring and survey. HERD is composed of a 3-D cubic calorimeter (CALO) surrounded by microstrip silicon trackers (STKs) from five sides except the bottom. CALO is made of about 10 4 cubes of LYSO crystals, corresponding to about 55 radiation lengths and 3 nuclear interaction lengths, respectively. The top STK microstrips of seven X-Y layers are sandwiched with tungsten converters to make precise directional measurements of incoming electrons and gamma-rays. In the baseline design, each of the four side SKTs is made of only three layers microstrips. All STKs will also be used for measuring the charge and incoming directions of cosmic rays, as well as identifying back scattered tracks. With this design, HERD can achieve the following performance: energy resolution of 1% for electrons and gamma-rays beyond 100 GeV, 20% for protons from 100 GeV to 1 PeV; electron/proton separation power better than 10 −5 ; effective geometrical factors of >3 m 2 sr for electron and diffuse gamma-rays, >2 m 2 sr for cosmic ray nuclei. R&D is under way for reading out the LYSO signals with optical fiber coupled to image intensified CCD and the prototype of one layer of CALO.

DUNE is a dual-site experiment for long-baseline neutrino oscillation studies, neutrino astrophysics and nucleon decay searches. ProtoDUNE Dual Phase (DP) is a 6 $$\times $$ ×  6 $$\times $$ ×  6 m$$^3$$ 3 liquid argon time-projection-chamber (LArTPC) that recorded cosmic-muon data at the CERN Neutrino Platform in 2019–2020 as a prototype of the DUNE Far Detector. Charged particles propagating through the LArTPC produce ionization and scintillation light. The scintillation light signal in these detectors can provide the trigger for non-beam events. In addition, it adds precise timing capabilities and improves the calorimetry measurements. In ProtoDUNE-DP, scintillation and electroluminescence light produced by cosmic muons in the LArTPC is collected by photomultiplier tubes placed up to 7 m away from the ionizing track. In this paper, the ProtoDUNE-DP photon detection system performance is evaluated with a particular focus on the different wavelength shifters, such as PEN and TPB, and the use of Xe-doped LAr, considering its future use in giant LArTPCs. The scintillation light production and propagation processes are analyzed and a comparison of simulation to data is performed, improving understanding of the liquid argon properties.

Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chamber(MRPC) is a widely used timing detector with a typical time resolution of about 60 ps. This makes MRPC an optimal choice for the time of flight(ToF) system in many large physics experiments. The prior work on improving the time resolution is mainly focused on altering the detector geometry, and therefore the improvement of the data analysis algorithm has not been fully explored. This paper proposes a new time reconstruction algorithm based on the deep neural networks(NN) and improves the MRPC time resolution by about 10 ps. Since the development of the high energy physics experiments has pushed the timing requirements for the MRPC to a higher level, this algorithm could become a potential substitution of the time over threshold(ToT) method to achieve a time resolution below 30 ps.

The measurement of the K ± production in the Semi-Inclusive Deep Inelastic Scattering (SIDIS) can provide further knowledge about the structure of nucleon, and thus it is purposed in the Solenoidal Large Intensity Device(SoLID) at Jefferson Lab(JLab). In this experiment, the identification of the kaons is planed to be accomplished with the Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers(MRPC), and the requirement for the time resolution is around 20 ps. This is very challenging for the present MRPC systems (typical resolution 60 ps), while in this paper, it is proved that the performance can be improved largely if the signal waveform is obtained and analyzed with a neural network method. In a cosmic ray experiment, the time resolution of a 6-gap 0.25mm-thick MRPC reaches 36 ps with this method, and a even better performance is expected with a thinner MRPC.

Dedicated detector simulations are very important for the success of high energy physics experiments. They not only bring benefits to the optimization of the detectors, but can also improve the precision of the physics results. To design a Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chamber (MRPC) with a very good time resolution, a detailed monte-carlo simulation of the detector is needed and described in this paper. The simulation can produce detector signal waveforms which contain a complete information about the events. The detector performance filled with different gas mixtures is studied, and comparison between simulation and experimental results show a good agreement.