There are many TeV detectors run by universities such as the Fly's Eye, and Veritas, but the question that has been on my mind is how to develop a wideband TeV detector design that is compact and sensitive, and usable by hobbyists. The first idea, which I'll try to keep fairly static in the first part of the posts, then add additional directions in the second part of the posts for clarity, and guided by calculations of sensitivity and what kind of a beast we are hunting, one of incredible power, and thus far limited in detectability by only the most well-equipped universities - the TeV photon.
That's it for the introduction, the first toy model we are going to analyze is constructed with parallel plates where one of the plates is made of copper tape, forming a microstrip antenna.. The idea is that the air shower will ionize the air between the microstrip and the bottom plate in correlation with a cerenkov signal on the microstrip microwave antenna.
The setup should be something like this:
/ / Microstrip /
| | Microstrip|
\ \ Microstrip \
The angled slashes are parallel plates in themselves, and are designed to have a detection peak in the 100+TeV energy spectrum, as with the direct air shower detectors. This entire setup is shaped like a layered bowl. The lowest layer is a set of parallel plates making up the first layer. An incoming particle shower along the line of sight to a source (such as the Crab) will produce a roughly equal ionization between all plates. This is ensured by the balance of a highly sensitive wheatstone bridge. A single particle will change the resistance in one of the branches, resulting in a negative result. A collimated gamma shower in the line of sight will result in a balance between all plates. connected to this wheatstone bridge is a capacitor. When this signal crosses 0 for any time, an event is detected.
The seperate component of this detector will involve a microstrip antenna. This antenna is to detect the microwave-frequency emission associated with the air shower. these are all oriented towards the source, and once again a wheatstone bridge is connected to it. These two signals are divided, the 2nd by the first. This signal is fed into an amplifier, then to a electrical detector. The detector has an increasing signal output the closer a source is to the field of view. This should enable drift scanning.
Whether the divider is possible or not is something I'll analyze in the next posting.
