Development of a novel delta E-E particle identification telescope readout system

In order to understand the space weather, we need to know not only the magnetic and electric field environment around the earth, but also the distribution and behavior in the space of energetic particles. Various instruments have been sent into space to retrieve information about the particle composition, energy, density and velocity from the low earth orbit (LEO) to interplanetary space. Here we will present a novel compact instrument design which can detect the three dimensional distribution of energetic electrons and different ion species in space.; Solid state detectors using the principle of a DeltaE-E telescope are used to measure energy and composition of energetic particles. When an energetic particle passes through a two-detector stack, it will deposit a fraction of its energy in each detector depending on its intrinsic energy and the type of the particle. Particle energy and composition information can be extracted from the relationship between the energies deposited in these two detectors.; A novel, compact pin-hole DeltaE-E telescope is described in this dissertation. This instrument is able to measure the fluxes, energies and pitch angles of energetic electrons from 30keV to 300keV and also, the fluxes of major ion species over the energy range from 75keV to tens of MeV can be determined. This design has been named as the Loss Cone Imager (LCI) and is being fabricated for the Air Force DSX (Demonstration and Science Experiment) mission. The LCI has two types of sensor packages: RSH (Rotating Sensor Head) and HST (High Sensitive Telescope).; A new charge sensitive pre-amplifier for use with high capacitance detectors has been designed for the LCI. Noise analysis and optimization of energy resolution are described. Integrated electronic circuits are used for generating analog signals from each telescope. These signals will be processed into the digital data and will be sent to the ground for further scientific analysis.; Monte Carlo simulation (GEANT4) has been used to simulate the detector stack response to incident energetic particles. The simulation results are used to optimize the instrument design.; The readout electronic circuits presented in the dissertation for the LCI have been assembled and tested in our lab. All the circuit designs and simulations are original works by the author. The test results are presented in this dissertation.