The balloon-borne Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass (CREAM) experiment launched five times from Antarctica has achieved a cumulative flight duration of about 156 days above 99.5% of the atmosphere. The instrument is configured with complementary and redundant particle detectors designed to extend direct measurements of cosmic-ray composition to the highest energies practical with balloon flights. All elements from protons to iron nuclei are separated with excellent charge resolution. Here we report results from the first two flights of ~70 days, which indicate hardening of the elemental spectra above ~200GeV/nucleon and a spectral difference between the two most abundant species, protons and helium nuclei. These results challenge the view that cosmic-ray spectra are simple power laws below the so-called -knee‖ at ~10 15 eV. This discrepant hardening may result from a relatively nearby source, or it could represent spectral concavity caused by interactions of cosmic rays with the accelerating shock. Other possible explanations should also be investigated.

We present new measurements of the energy spectra of cosmic-ray (CR) nuclei from the second flight of the balloon-borne experiment Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass (CREAM). The instrument included different particle detectors to provide redundant charge identification and measure the energy of CRs up to several hundred TeV. The measured individual energy spectra of C, O, Ne, Mg, Si, and Fe are presented up to ∼ 10 14 eV. The spectral shape looks nearly the same for these primary elements and it can be fitted to an E −2.66±0.04 power law in energy. Moreover, a new measurement of the absolute intensity of nitrogen in the 100-800 GeV/n energy range with smaller errors than previous observations, clearly indicates a hardening of the spectrum at high energy. The relative abundance of N/O at the top of the atmosphere is measured to be 0.080 ± 0.025 (stat.) ±0.025 (sys.) at ∼ 800 GeV/n, in good agreement with a recent result from the first CREAM flight.

We present new measurements of heavy cosmic-ray nuclei at high energies performed during the first flight of the balloon-borne cosmic-ray experiment CREAM (Cosmic-Ray Energetics And Mass). This instrument uses multiple charge detectors Preprint submitted to Elsevier 12 August 2008and a transition radiation detector to provide the first high accuracy measurements of the relative abundances of elements from boron to oxygen up to energies around 1 TeV/n. The data agree with previous measurements at lower energies and show a relatively steep decline (∼ E −0.6 to E −0.5 ) at high energies. They further show the source abundance of nitrogen relative to oxygen is ∼ 10% in the TeV/n region.

The TOTEM Experiment is designed to measure the total proton-proton cross-section with the luminosity-independent method and to study elastic and diffractive pp scattering at the LHC. To achieve optimum forward coverage for charged particles emitted by the pp collisions in the interaction point IP5, two tracking telescopes, T1 and T2, are installed on each side of the IP in the pseudorapidity region 3.1 ≤ |η| ≤ 6.5, and special movable beam-pipe insertions -called Roman Pots (RPs) -are placed at distances of ±147 m and ±220 m from IP5. This article describes in detail the working of the TOTEM detector to produce physics results in the first three years of operation and data taking at the LHC.

The TOTEM Experiment will measure the total pp cross-section with the luminosityindependent method and study elastic and diffractive scattering at the LHC. To achieve optimum forward coverage for charged particles emitted by the pp collisions in the interaction point IP5, two tracking telescopes, T1 and T2, will be installed on each side in the pseudorapidity region 3.1 ≤ |η| ≤ 6.5, and Roman Pot stations will be placed at distances of ±147 m and ±220 m from IP5. Being an independent experiment but technically integrated into CMS, TOTEM will first operate in standalone mode to pursue its own physics programme and at a later stage together with CMS for a common physics programme. This article gives a description of the TOTEM apparatus and its performance.

The Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass (CREAM) experiment is designed to investigate high energy (10 12 ~ 10 15 eV) cosmic rays over the elemental range from hydrogen to iron (1 ≤ Z ≤ 26), through a series of long balloon flights. Originally planned to be flown on the first of the new Ultra Long Duration Balloon (ULDB) being developed by NASA, the CREAM instrument was launched as a long duration balloons (LDB) payload from McMurdo Station, Antarctica on December 16, 2004 and flew for a record-breaking 42 days. A second CREAM flight one year later lasted 28 days. The CREAM design is unique in that it obtains two independent energy measurements using a tungsten/scintillator sampling calorimeter and a Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) with up to four independent charge measurements of incident particles using a novel Timing-based scintillator Charge Detector (TCD), a plastic Cherenkov Detector (CD), scintillating fiber hodoscopes, and a Silicon Charge Detector (SCD). The energy limits are determined by trigger efficiency and telemetry bandwidth at the low end and by statistics at the high end.

In August 2015, the CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET), designed for long exposure observations of high energy cosmic rays, docked with the International Space Station (ISS) and shortly thereafter began to collect data. CALET will measure the cosmic ray electron spectrum over the energy range of 1 GeV to 20 TeV with a very high resolution of 2% above 100 GeV, based on a dedicated instrument incorporating an exceptionally thick 30 radiation-length calorimeter with both total absorption and imaging (TASC and IMC) units. Each TASC readout channel must be carefully calibrated over the extremely wide dynamic range of CALET that spans six orders of magnitude in order to obtain a degree of calibration accuracy matching the resolution of energy measurements. These calibrations consist of calculating the conversion factors between ADC units and energy deposits, ensuring linearity over each gain range, and providing a seamless transition between neighboring gain ranges. This paper describes these calibration methods in detail, along with the resulting data and associated accuracies. The results presented in this paper show that a sufficient accuracy was achieved for the calibrations of each channel in order to obtain a suitable resolution over the entire dynamic range of the electron spectrum measurement

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