Development of a 3-D cubic crystal calorimeter for space: CaloCube

An innovative calorimetric solution for direct measurements of high-energy cosmic rays in space is described in this paper. The basic idea is to build a large acceptance, very deep, homogeneous and isotropic calorimeter (CaloCube), to be placed in orbit around the Earth for direct measurements of the cosmic-ray spectrum up to the PeV region. The large acceptance will be achieved by accepting particles coming from every direction in space; the fine granularity, coupled with the large depth, will guarantee an excellent performance in the e/p separation, as well as in the energy resolution both for electromagnetic and hadronic particles. An overall description of the system, as well as some preliminary test beam data of a medium-size prototype will be described.