Speaker
Description
Beryllium-10, a so called clock isotope can provide unique measurements of Galactic cosmic ray (GCR) lifetimes with respect to the size of the propagation halo in the Milky Way. To this date there are no high-precision measurements of beryllium-10 above 2 GeV/n. The High Energy Light Isotope eXperiment (HELIX), a balloon-borne magnet spectrometer, directly measures a cosmic ray’s charge, magnetic rigidity, and velocity to identify the isotopes of beryllium and other light nuclei with ultimate goal of extending the resolved measurements of beryllium isotopes to 10 GeV/n. HELIX employs three detectors to achieve its science goal : the rigidity of cosmic rays is measured with the high-precision drift chamber tracker (DCT) which sits inside a 1T superconducting magnet, the charge of incident cosmic rays is measured by the time-of-flight (TOF) as well as velocities of lower energy cosmic rays, finally an aerogel-based ring-imaging Cherenkov detector is used to measure the velocities of higher energy cosmic rays. HELIX underwent an engineering flight in the boreal spring of 2024 from Esrange, Sweden. In this contribution the payload, flight, and the status of ongoing analysis efforts will be discussed.
