Abstract The Plastic Scintillator Detector (PSD) onboard the DArk Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) is designed to measure cosmic ray charge (Z) and to act as a veto detector for gamma ray identification. To fully exploit the charge identification potential of PSD and to enhance its capability to identify gamma ray events, we develop an alignment method for the PSD. The path length of a given track in the volume of a PSD bar is derived taking into account the shift and rotation alignment corrections. By examining energy spectra of corner-passing events and fully contained events, position shifts and rotations of all PSD bars are obtained, and are found to be on average about 1 mm and 0.0015 radian respectively. To validate the alignment method, we introduce artificial shifts and rotations of PSD bars into the detector simulation. These shift and rotation parameters can be recovered successfully by the alignment procedure. As a result of the PSD alignment procedure, the charge resolution of the PSD is improved from 4% to 8%, depending on the nuclei.
Keywords instrumentation: detectors — methods: data analysis
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