The High Energy cosmic-Radiation Detection (HERD) facility on board the Chinese Space Station: hunting for high-energy cosmic rays

Abstract

The High Energy cosmic-Radiation Detection (HERD) facility has been proposed as a space astronomy payload onboard the future China’s Space Station (CSS) aimed to detect charged cosmic-rays and gamma-rays from few GeV to PeV energies. The main science objectives of HERD are searching for dark matter particles, the study of cosmic ray chemical composition and high energy gamma-ray observations. HERD will extend high precision and high statistics spectral measurements of individual cosmic ray species up to few PeV, reaching the knee of the all-particle spectrum. It will also observe the gamma-ray sky from a few hundred of MeV up to 1 TeV contributing to multi-messenger astronomy together with ground-based high energy gamma-ray telescope and neutrino and gravitational waves detectors.