A summary on an investigation of GAGG:Ce afterglow emission in the context of future space applications within the HERMES nanosatellite mission

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Authors

DILILLO Giuseppe CAMPANA Riccardo ZAMPA Nicola FUSCHINO Fabio PAULETTA Giovanni RASHEVSKAYA Irina AMBROSINO Filippo BARUZZO Marco CAUZ Diego CIRRINCIONE Daniela CITOSSI Marco CASA Giovanni Della DI RUZZA Benedetto GALGÓCZI Gábor LABANTI Claudio EVANGELISTA Yuri ŘÍPA Jakub VACCHI Andrea TOMMASINO Francesco VERROI Enrico FIORE Fabrizio

Year of publication 2021
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference Proc. SPIE 11444, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2020: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 1144493
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Science

Citation
Web https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2561053
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/12.2561053
Keywords Scintillators; GAGG:Ce; afterglow; space missions; nanosatellites; Near-Earth radiation environ- ment
Description GAGG:Ce (Cerium-doped Gadolinium Aluminium Gallium Garnet) is a promising new scintillator crystal. A wide array of interesting features, such as high light output, fast decay times, almost non-existent intrinsic background and robustness, make GAGG:Ce an interesting candidate as a component of new space-based gamma-ray detectors. As a consequence of its novelty, literature on GAGG:Ce is still lacking on points crucial to its applicability in space missions. In particular, GAGG:Ce is characterized by unusually high and long-lasting delayed luminescence. This afterglow emission can be stimulated by the interactions between the scintillator and the particles of the near-Earth radiation environment. By contributing to the noise, it will impact the detector performance to some degree. In this manuscript we summarize the results of an irradiation campaign of GAGG:Ce crystals with protons, conducted in the framework of the HERMES-TP/SP (High Energy Rapid Modular Ensemble of Satellites - Technological and Scientific Pathfinder) mission. A GAGG:Ce sample was irradiated with 70 MeV protons, at doses equivalent to those expected in equatorial and sun-synchronous LowEarth orbits over orbital periods spanning 6 months to 10 years, time lapses representative of satellite lifetimes. We introduce a new model of GAGG:Ce afterglow emission able to fully capture our observations. Results are applied to the HERMES-TP/SP scenario, aiming at an upper-bound estimate of the detector performance degradation due to the afterglow emission expected from the interaction between the scintillator and the nearEarth radiation environment.
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