首页 | 本学科首页   官方微博 | 高级检索  
相似文献
 共查询到20条相似文献,搜索用时 468 毫秒
1.
The evolution of the cosmic ray primary composition in the energy range 106–107 GeV (i.e. the “knee” region) is studied by means of the e.m. and muon data of the Extensive Air Shower EAS-TOP array (Campo Imperatore, National Gran Sasso Laboratories). The measurement is performed through: (a) the correlated muon number (Nμ) and shower size (Ne) spectra, and (b) the evolution of the average muon numbers and their distributions as a function of the shower size. From analysis (a) the dominance of helium primaries at the knee, and therefore the possibility that the knee itself is due to a break in their energy spectrum (at EkHe=(3.5±0.3)×106 GeV) are deduced. Concerning analysis (b), the measurement accuracies allow the classification in terms of three mass groups: light (p,He), intermediate (CNO), and heavy (Fe). At primary energies E0≈106 GeV the results are consistent with the extrapolations of the data from direct experiments. In the knee region the obtained evolution of the energy spectra leads to: (i) an average steep spectrum of the light mass group (γp,He>3.1), (ii) a spectrum of the intermediate mass group harder than the one of the light component (γCNO2.75, possibly bending at EkCNO≈(6–7)×106 GeV), (iii) a constant slope for the spectrum of the heavy primaries (γFe2.3–2.7) consistent with the direct measurements. In the investigated energy range, the average primary mass increases from lnA=1.6–1.9 at E01.5×106 GeV to lnA=2.8–3.1 at E01.5×107 GeV. The result supports the standard acceleration and propagation models of galactic cosmic rays that predict rigidity dependent cut-offs for the primary spectra of the different nuclei. The uncertainties connected to the hadronic interaction model (QGSJET in CORSIKA) used for the interpretation are discussed.  相似文献   

2.
Event-by-event measured arrival time distributions of extensive air shower (EAS) muons are affected and distorted by various interrelated effects which originate from the time resolution of the timing detectors, from fluctuations of the reference time and the number (multiplicity) of detected muons spanning the arrival time distribution of the individual EAS events. The origin of these effects is discussed, and different correction procedures, which involve detailed simulations, are proposed and illustrated. The discussed distortions are relevant for relatively small observation distances (Rμ<200 m) from the EAS core. Their significance decreases with increasing observation distance and increasing primary energies. Local arrival time distributions which refer to the observed arrival time of the first local muon prove to be less sensitive to the mass of the primary. This feature points to the necessity of arrival time measurements with additional information on the curvature of the EAS disk.  相似文献   

3.
The GREX/COVER_PLASTEX experiment has measured the temporal and spatial fine structure of the EAS disc at sea level in a new and original way, using resistive plate counter detectors for direct measurements of the arrival time of each particle crossing the detector. Data were taken at EAS core distances up to 100 m for shower size N > 105 (PeV energy range). Arrival times of shower particles were measured with nanosecond accuracy. More than 450000 air shower events have been included in this analysis.  相似文献   

4.
Various features and correlations of the arrival time and angle-of- incidence distributions of muons of extensive air showers (EAS) are studied by analyses based on Monte-Carlo simulations of the EAS development by using the air shower simulation code CORSIKA. Trends and dependencies of the temporal dispersion of the EAS muon component on shower size and distance from the shower core are displayed by the distribution of the arrival time and angle of incidence of the first muon, of the mean and median of the single shower distribution. Special attention is called to multi-correlations in observations at different radial distances from the shower core. These ‘radial’ correlations provide additional information for the discrimination of different EAS primaries, while the correlation of muon arrival time and angle-of-incidence is shown to improve the mass separation only insignificantly. This feature does not basically change, when arrival times and angles of incidence are displayed by transformed quantities like ‘muon production heights’.  相似文献   

5.
《Astroparticle Physics》2002,16(3):245-263
The experiment KASCADE observes simultaneously the electron–photon, muon, and hadron components of high-energy extensive air showers (EAS). The analysis of EAS observables for an estimate of energy and mass of the primary particle invokes extensive Monte Carlo simulations of the EAS development for preparing reference patterns. The present studies utilize the air shower simulation code corsika with the hadronic interaction models VENUS, QGSJet and Sibyll, including simulations of the detector response and efficiency. By applying non-parametric techniques the measured data have been analyzed in an event-by-event mode and the mass and energy of the EAS inducing particles are reconstructed. Special emphasis is given to methodical limitations and the dependence of the results on the hadronic interaction model used. The results obtained from KASCADE data reproduce the knee in the primary spectrum, but reveal a strong model dependence. Owing to the systematic uncertainties introduced by the hadronic interaction models no strong change of chemical composition can be claimed in the energy range around the knee.  相似文献   

6.
The GU miniarray is a ultra high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) detector consisting of eight plastic scintillators of carpet area 2 m2, each viewed by fast PMTs. It is used to detect Giant EAS by the method of time spread measurement of secondary particles produced in the atmosphere. The energies of the air showers have been reestimated using CORSIKA program. As in the original analysis the Cosmic Ray energy was determined via its relation to the ground level parameter Ns, the shower size. This relation was obtained previously through a best fit relation in agreement with QGS model and Yakutsk data. In this work we use CORSIKA code with QGSJET model of high energy hadronic interactions to simulate miniarray data leading to a modified relation between primary energy and shower size. A revised energy spectrum is reported for 1017–1019 eV primary energy.  相似文献   

7.
We compute the big bang nucleosynthesis limit on the number of light neutrino degrees of freedom in a model-independent likelihood analysis based on the abundances of 4He and 7Li. We use the two-dimensional likelihood functions to simultaneously constrain the baryon-to-photon ratio and the number of light neutrinos for a range of 4He abundances Yp = 0.225–0.250, as well as a range in primordial 7Li abundances from (1.6 to 4.1) ×10−10. For (7Li/H)p = 1.6 × 10−10, as can be inferred from the 7Li data from Population II halo stars, the upper limit to Nν based on the current best estimate of the primordial 4He abundance of Yp = 0.238 is Nν < 4.3 and varies from Nν < 3.3 (at 95% C.L.) when Yp = 0.225 to Nν < 5.3 when Yp = 0.250. If 7Li is depleted in these stars the upper limit to Nν is relaxed. Taking (7Li/H)p = 4.1 × 10−10, the limit varies from Nν < 3.9 when Yp = 0.225 to Nν 6 when Yp = 0.250. We also consider the consequences on the upper limit to Nν if recent observations of deuterium in high-redshift quasar absorption-line systems are confirmed.  相似文献   

8.
《Astroparticle Physics》2003,19(6):715-728
The KASCADE experiment measures a high number of EAS observables with a large degree of sampling of the electron–photon, muon, and hadron components. It provides accurate data for an event-by-event analysis of the primary cosmic ray flux in the energy range around the knee. The possibility of selecting samples of enriched proton and iron induced extensive air showers by applying the statistical techniques of multivariate analyses is scrutinized using detailed Monte Carlo simulations of three different primaries. The purity and efficiency of the proton and iron classification probability is investigated. After obtaining enriched samples from the measured data by application of the procedures the reconstructed number of hadrons, hadronic energy and other parameters are investigated in the primary energy range 1015–1016 eV. By comparing these shower parameters for purified proton and iron events, respectively, with simulated distributions an attempt is made to check the validity of strong interaction models at high energies.  相似文献   

9.
An interpretation of Akeno giant air shower array (AGASA) data by comparing the experimental results with the simulated ones by cosmic ray simulation for KASCADE (CORSIKA) has been made. General features of the electromagnetic component and low energy muons observed by AGASA can be well reproduced by CORSIKA. The form of the lateral distribution of charged particles agrees well with the experimental one between a few hundred metres and 2000 m from the core, irrespective of the hadronic interaction model studied and the primary composition (proton or iron). It does not depend on the primary energy between 1017.5 and 1020 eV as the experiment shows. If we evaluate the particle density measured by scintillators of 5 cm thickness at 600 m from the core S0(600), suffix 0 denotes the vertically incident shower) by taking into account the similar conditions as in the experiment, the conversion relation from S0(600) to the primary energy is expressed as E (eV)=2.15×1017S0(600)1.015 within 10% uncertainty among the models and composition used, which suggests the present AGASA conversion factor is the lower limit. Although the form of the muon lateral distribution fits well to the experiment within 1000 m from the core, the absolute values change with hadronic interaction model and primary composition. The slope of the ρμ(600) (muon density above 1 GeV at 600 m from the core) vs. S0(600) relation in experiment is flatter than that in simulation of any hadronic model and primary composition. As the experimental slope is constant from 1015 to 1019 eV, we need to study this relation in a wide primary energy range to infer the rate of change of chemical composition with energy.  相似文献   

10.
《Astroparticle Physics》2002,17(4):1083-475
Using data from the HEGRA air shower array, taken in the period from April 1998 to March 2000, upper limits on the ratio Iγ/ICR of the diffuse photon flux Iγ to the hadronic cosmic ray flux ICR are determined for the energy region 20–100 TeV. The analysis uses a gamma–hadron discrimination which is based on differences in the development of photon- and hadron-induced air showers after the shower maximum. A method which is sensitive only to the non-isotropic component of the diffuse photon flux yields an upper limit of Iγ/ICR (at 54 TeV) <2.0×10−3 (at the 90% confidence level) for a sky region near the inner galaxy (20°< galactic longitude <60° and |galactic latitude |<5°). A method which is sensitive to both the isotropic and the non-isotropic component yields global upper limits of Iγ/ICR (at 31 TeV) <1.2×10−2 and Iγ/ICR (at 53 TeV) <1.4×10−2 (at the 90% confidence level).  相似文献   

11.
《Astroparticle Physics》2001,14(4):245-260
Measurements of electron, muon and hadron lateral distributions of extensive air showers as recorded in the Karlsruhe shower core and array detector experiment are presented. The data cover the energy range from 5×1014 eV up to almost 1017 eV and extend from the inner core region to distances of 200 m. The electron and muon distributions are corrected for mutual contaminations by taking into account the detector properties in the experiment. All distributions are well described by NKG functions. The scale radii describing the electron and hadron data best are 30 and 10 m, respectively. We discuss the correlation between the scale radii and the ‘age' parameter as well as their dependence on shower size, zenith angle, and particle energy threshold.  相似文献   

12.
The effect of the geomagnetic Lorentz force on the muon component of extensive air shower (EAS) has been studied in a Monte Carlo generated simulated data sample. This geomagnetic field affects the paths of muons in an EAS, causing a local contrast or polar asymmetry in the abundance of positive and negative muons about the shower axis. The asymmetry can be approximately expressed as a function of transverse separation between the positive and negative muons barycentric positions in the EAS through opposite quadrants across the shower core in the shower front plane. In the present study, it is found that the transverse muon barycenter separation and its maximum value obtained from the polar variation of the parameter are higher for iron primaries than protons for highly inclined showers. Hence, in principle, these parameters can be exploited to the measurement of primary cosmic-ray mass composition. Possibility of practical realization of the proposed method in a real experiment is briefly discussed.  相似文献   

13.
Extensive air showers detected by the GREX array have been sampled by means of highly segmented 8 m2 bakelite RPC in the GREX/COVER_PLASTEX experiment. Delay distributions of particles with respect to the first arriving particle in the EAS front at PeV energies have been analysed for individual events in the core distance range of 0–100 m. It is shown that both mean arrival time and EAS front thickness in individual showers fluctuate strongly and cannot be a good measure of the distance from the EAS axis in a 0–100 m core distance interval.

Individual distributions have been compared with integrated inclusive distributions measured in the same experiment. Results indicate that the width of the individual distribution is systematically less than that of the inclusive distribution. It means that the bulk of particles in individual showers arrive as a relatively compact group delayed by different time intervals from the first arriving particle. Such fluctuations of the arrival time for most of the shower particles may be the consequence of large fluctuations in the shower longitudinal development.

Comparison with CORSIKA Monte Carlo simulations confirmed the difference between the mean width of inclusive and individual arrival time distribution. It revealed also the presence in the experiment of the excessive train of delayed particles near the shower core. This train is obviously due to the non-relativistic low energy hadrons most abundant in the shower core region.  相似文献   


14.
A string-decay cascade phenomenological model that conservatively extrapolates accelerator data has been adapted to cosmic ray-air collisions. Monte Carlo simulations of extensive air showers (EAS) initiated by primary protons and nuclei have been performed. The best agreement between the predictions of this model and experimental data on spectra of electron sizes (Ne) for vertical incidence at different altitudes is found for a heavy mass composition of the cosmic rays (above the “knee” energy).  相似文献   

15.
Monte Carlo simulations show that the pulse profile of erenkov photons measured near the core of an extensive air shower is sensitive to the secondary muon/electron ratio of the cascade. erenkov pulses can easily be measured with a single large area mirror viewed by a photomultiplier tube subtending a small field of view (1°). Even for such a simple experiment, exposed to EAS from a range of core locations and arrival directions, strong statistical differences are shown to exist between the pulse parameter distributions of primary protons and those of heavier primary particles. A range of primary energies can be investigated by varying the zenith angle of observations. In this paper, results from simulations of primaries in the energy range 20 TeV to 400 TeV are presented, although in principle the technique could be extended to include the knee of the spectrum. At the lower end of this energy range results can be compared to direct measurements of the composition, while measurements at the upper end can augment results from existing ground based experiments.  相似文献   

16.
Extensive simulations have been carried out with CORSIKA version 5.62 to investigate the general properties of giant cosmic air shower in the energy range 1–100 EeV. The comparison between protons, heavy nuclei and γ initiated showers exhibits unexpected and interesting features. The apparent muon electron ratio at great distances (1.5 km from axis) tends to be comparable at ultra-high energy in both photon-induced cascades and hadronic cascades (compensation between the enhancement versus energy of photo-production cross-section and of the decrease of both pair production cross-section and the bremsstrahlung cross-section, with Landau–Pomeranchuk–Migdal effect); for proton and nuclei primaries, a correlation with lateral electron profile suggests a new energy estimator, in complement to electrons size or density at 600 m, suitable for the determination of the total primary energy spectrum. Another tendency is the local contrast in the abundance of positive and negative muons (with a possible ellipticity in the lateral muon distribution) induced by the geomagnetic field, especially visible for some azimuthal and zenith angles. These distortions are more intense for heavy primaries; they can be exploited on the most favorable horizontal axis or areas, for the discrimination between nuclei and protons.  相似文献   

17.
Diffuse γ-rays probe the highest-energy processes at the largest scales. Here we derive model-independent constraints on the hadronic contribution to the Galactic and extragalactic γ-ray spectra at in the energy range 50 MeVEγ10 GeV. The hadronic component is dominated by emission from neutral pions, with a characteristic spectrum symmetric about mπ0/2. We exploit the well-defined properties of the pion decay spectrum to quantify the maximum pionic fraction of the observed γ-ray intensity. We find that the Galactic spectrum above 30 MeV can be atmost about 50% pionic. The maximum pionic contribution to the extragalactic spectrum is energy dependent; it also depends on the redshift range over which the sources are distributed, ranging from as low as about 20% for pions generated very recently, to as much as 90% if the pions are generated around redshift 10. The implications of these constraints for models of γ-ray and neutrino emission are briefly discussed.  相似文献   

18.
We analyze an extended redshift sample of Abell/ACO clusters and compare the results with those coming from numerical simulations of the cluster distribution, based on the truncated Zel'dovich approximation (TZA), for a list of eleven dark matter (DM) models. For each model we run several realizations, so that we generate a set of 48 independent mock Abell/ACO cluster samples per model, on which we estimate cosmic variance effects. Other than the standard CDM model, we consider (a) Ω0 = 1 CDM models based on lowering the Hubble parameter and/or on tilting the primordial spectrum; (b) Ω0 = 1 Cold + Hot DM models with 0.1 ≤Ων ≤0.5; (c) low-density flat ΛCDM models with 0.3 ≤Ω0 ≤0.5. We compare real and simulated cluster distributions by analysing correlation statistics, the probability density function, and supercluster properties from percolation analysis. We introduce a generalized definition of the spectrum shape parameter Γ in terms of σ25/σ8, where σris the rms fluctuation amplitude within a sphere of radius r. As a general result, we find that the distribution of galaxy clusters provides a constraint only on the shape of the power spectrum, but not on its amplitude: a shape parameter 0.18 Γ 0.25 and an effective spectral index at the 20 h−1 Mpc scale −1.1 neff −0.9 are required by the Abell/ACO data. In order to obtain complementary constraints on the spectrum amplitude, we consider the cluster abundance as estimated using the Press-Schechter approach, whose reliability is explicitly tested against N-body simulations. By combining results from the analysis of the distribution and the abundance of clusters we conclude that, of the cosmological models considered here, the only viable models are either Cold + Hot DM ones with 0.2 Ων 0.3, better if shared between two massive ν species, and ΛCDM ones with 0.3 Ω00.5.  相似文献   

19.
《Astroparticle Physics》2004,20(6):641-652
The cosmic ray primary composition in the energy range between 1015 and 1016 eV, i.e., around the “knee” of the primary spectrum, has been studied through the combined measurements of the EAS-TOP air shower array (2005 m a.s.l., 105 m2 collecting area) and the MACRO underground detector (963 m a.s.l., 3100 m w.e. of minimum rock overburden, 920 m2 effective area) at the National Gran Sasso Laboratories. The used observables are the air shower size (Ne) measured by EAS-TOP and the muon number (Nμ) recorded by MACRO. The two detectors are separated on average by 1200 m of rock, and located at a respective zenith angle of about 30°. The energy threshold at the surface for muons reaching the MACRO depth is approximately 1.3 TeV. Such muons are produced in the early stages of the shower development and in a kinematic region quite different from the one relevant for the usual NμNe studies. The measurement leads to a primary composition becoming heavier at the knee of the primary spectrum, the knee itself resulting from the steepening of the spectrum of a primary light component (p, He) of Δγ=0.7±0.4 at E04×1015 eV. The result confirms the ones reported from the observation of the low energy muons at the surface (typically in the GeV energy range), showing that the conclusions do not depend on the production region kinematics. Thus, the hadronic interaction model used (CORSIKA/QGSJET) provides consistent composition results from data related to secondaries produced in a rapidity region exceeding the central one. Such an evolution of the composition in the knee region supports the “standard” galactic acceleration/propagation models that imply rigidity dependent breaks of the different components, and therefore breaks occurring at lower energies in the spectra of the light nuclei.  相似文献   

20.
《Astroparticle Physics》2003,19(6):703-714
The attenuation of the electron shower size beyond the shower maximum is studied with the KASCADE extensive air shower (EAS) experiment in the primary energy range of about 1014–1016 eV. Attenuation and absorption lengths are determined by applying different approaches, including the method of constant intensity, the decrease of the flux of EASs with increasing zenith angle, and its variation with ground pressure. We observe a significant dependence of the results on the applied method. The determined values of the attenuation length ranges from 175 to 196 g/cm2 and of the absorption length from 100 to 120 g/cm2. The origin of these differences is discussed emphasizing the influence of intrinsic shower fluctuations.  相似文献   

设为首页 | 免责声明 | 关于勤云 | 加入收藏

Copyright©北京勤云科技发展有限公司  京ICP备09084417号