CosmoLink: Portable Coincidence Detector for On-Site Muon Flux Measurement

Abstract

The CosmoLink project aims to develop low cost, low power, long range and portable form factor particle detectors for experimental and educational research on Cosmic Rays. Use of these detectors distributed across locations will be used for setup small scale telescope array experiments. Each detector unit in CosmoLink project consists of two plastic scintillators kept in stacked geometry to look for coincidence induced by cosmic ray particles. The scintillators are directly coupled with Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) for efficient light guiding. Each readout channel is equipped with an amplifier, discriminator and a peak-detect-and-hold circuit. Upon successful coincidence, the peak amplitude is digitized using Analog to Digital Converter (ADC). The coincidence count and ADC data are acquired using a low cost microcontroller. Multiple detectors can be grouped together like swarms and arranged in different geometries to collect data jointly. The acquired data is wirelessly transmitted to a central server with GPS Coordinates and other sensor data.