AMS Web Links

AMS Internal Info - Publications - Press coverage - AMS Institutes' pages - Hardware - Software - Physics - NASA and ISS

AMS 02 Main Home Page

• AMS-02 Home Page, our internal information page: http://ams.cern.ch/AMS/ams_homepage.html. Look here for detailed technical specs of subdetectors, etc. Don't expect much of a user interface; also, please do not abuse this server, which is important to our day to day work.

AMS publications

• The official AMS publications list is kept here.

Press coverage

• Space.com, "NASA puts Big Bang to the Test"
• CERN Courier, Helping the AMS experiment to detect antiparticles in space
• MIT Tech Talk, Discovery launches with MIT Particle Physics Experiment
• Taiwan Journal, Scientists aid search for cosmic antimatter
• Taipei Times, NCKU Joins Antimatter Search
• CNN coverage of STS-91 mission that carried the AMS prototype.
• Houston Chronicle story
• "Particle Man" by Andrew Lawler, Air & Space Magazine, April/May 2001
• more links coming soon

Institutes' pages

• Italian AMS page: http://ams.pg.infn.it/ams-italy/ams.htm, including the AMS-01 (prototype flight) brochure
• INFN Rome http://www.roma1.infn.it/exp/ams/
• MIT TRD Gas group

AMS Hardware pages

• Silicon Tracker http://ams.pg.infn.it/
• Time-Of-Flighthttp://macams1.bo.infn.it/
• Ring-Imaging Cerenkov Counterhttp://macams1.bo.infn.it/

AMS Software Pages

• Italian AMS Software page http://hpamsmi2.mib.infn.it/~wwwams/AMS_Milano.html

AMS physics topics

• Cosmic ray physics in general For a general introduction to particle physics, we recommend The Particle Adventure. A NASA essay on cosmic ray physics can by found here. A very thorough list of astroparticle physics experiments can be found here..
• Antimatter A good discussion of "baryogenesis" (the creation of matter in favor of antimatter in the Big Bang) can be found in the "Physics FAQ". Recent measurements of antimatter in cosmic rays were performed by BESS and HEAT, both balloon-lofted magnetic spectrometers.
• Dark Matter There are hundreds of papers on the "dark matter problem", the apparent presence of invisible matter which dominates the masses of galaxies. Attempts to detect SUSY neutralino dark matter include attempts to detect the particles themselves (cf. CDMS, see review talk here) and attempts to see gamma rays from neutralino-neutralino annihilations, and also attempts (like AMS's) to see the particle products of these annihilations. Recent cosmic ray results are from the experiments CAPRICE and HEAT.
• Strangelets A number of cosmic ray experiments have reported limits on strangelets in cosmic rays. In particular, very heavy strangelets - with masses of 5000 or so - have been very thoroughly searched for by experiments like LDEF, Trek, and HEAO-CRX. In addition, a long series of accelerator experiments (like NA49 at CERN, or E864 at Brookhaven) have searched for lighter strangelets in particle collisions.
• Age of Cosmic Rays The balloon experiment ISOMAX recently reported measurements of the Be-9/Be-10 ratio above 1 GeV. The Ulysses spacecraft also recently reported measurements.
• Gamma Ray Astronomy Gamma ray astronomy lost its flagship recently when the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory ended its mission. The upcoming satellite GLAST will take over around 2006. They have an informative web page if you want to learn more about gamma ray astronomy.
• Earth's Particle Environment Goddard Space Flight Center has an essay on trapped particles here.
• Microquasars Click here for a list of papers on microquasars.
• Primordial Black Holes. Here are some papers on cosmic-ray signals for black holes:
  • Antiprotons from primordial black holes (published in Astronomy & Astrophysics) : http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0112486
  • Antideuterons as a probe of primordial black holes (published in Astronomy & Astrophysics) : http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0207395
  • Galactic Cosmic Rays from PBHs and Primordial Spectra with a Scale (published in Phys. Lett. B) : http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0210149
  And some more general papers:
  • Antimatter from primordial black holes (Blois conf.) : http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0208182
  • Some aspects of primordial black hole physics (International conf. on theoretical physics) : http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0212225

NASA and ISS

NASA has a really outstanding Web presence. Anything you want to know about spaceflight and space science, you can find at www.nasa.gov
• The International Space Station assembly schedule.
• All International Space Station information.
• ISS has an active research program of which AMS is an important part. More links will come in the future...