High-energy astroparticle physics with CALET

Understand

The CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) will be installed on the Exposure Facility of the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM-EF) on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2014 where it will measure the cosmic-ray fluxes for five years.

• Its main scientific goals are to search for dark matter, investigate the mechanism of cosmic-ray acceleration and propagation in the Galaxy and discover possible astrophysical sources of high-energy electrons nearby the Earth.
• The instrument, under construction, consists of two layers of segmented plastic scintillators for the cosmic-ray charge identification (CHD), a 3 X$_0$-thick tungsten-scintillating fiber imaging calorimeter (IMC) and a 27 X$_0$-thick lead-tungstate calorimeter (TASC).
• The CHD can provide single-element separation in the interval of atomic number Z from 1 to 40, while IMC and TASC can measure the energy of cosmic-ray particles with excellent resolution in the range from few GeV up to several hundreds of TeV.