Measurements of the Cosmic Ray Composition with Air Shower Experiments

By K. Kampert, M. Unger. 2011

373 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract In this paper we review air shower data related to the mass composition of cosmic rays above 1015 eV. After explaining the basic relations between air shower observables and the primary mass and energy of cosmic rays, we present different approaches and results of composition studies with surface detectors. Furthermore, we discuss measurements of the longitudinal development of air showers from non-imaging Cherenkov detectors and fluorescence telescopes. The interpretation of these experimental results in terms of primary mass is highly susceptible to the theoretical uncertainties of hadronic interactions in air showers. We nevertheless attempt to calculate the logarithmic mass from the data using different hadronic interaction models and to study its energy dependence from 1015 eV to 1020 eV.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c9c2b34f213109a4bd32d95d6bba2e6fa3a321c

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Citations in the corpus

Hadronic interaction model sibyll 2.3d and extensive air showers (2020, background): “The spectra for the individual mass groups of cosmic-ray nuclei are not well known across the entire energy range of the indirect air-shower measurements [138].”
The Forward Physics Facility: Sites, experiments, and physics potential (2021, methodology): “To infer the energy and mass of cosmic rays from observable air shower features, for example, one has to quantitatively model the shower based on known particle physics [383].”
Radio detection of cosmic ray air showers in the digital era (2016, positive): “arrays and fluorescence detection of air showers with optical telescopes have been employed with great success over many decades [2].”
Depth of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Ray Induced Air Shower Maxima Measured by the Telescope Array Black Rock and Long Ridge FADC Fluorescence Detectors and Surface Array in Hybrid Mode (2018, background): “For details about the treatment of hadronic showers as related to cosmic ray composition refer to Engel et al. (2011) and Kampert & Unger (2012).”
LOFAR: The LOw-Frequency ARray (2013, background): “Up to the knee in the spectrum the composition of the primary CRs is dominated by protons, but at higher energies the compo- sition still needs clarification (Blümer et al. 2009; Kampert & Unger 2012).”
Open Questions in Cosmic-Ray Research at Ultrahigh Energies (2019, neutral): “Muon-based mass measurements systematically lead to heavier mass compositions than X max -based analyses (Kampert and Unger, 2012).”
Ultra high energy cosmic rays: implications of Auger data for source spectra and chemical composition (2013, methodology): “As was first discussed in [30] (see also [31]), the combined analysis of 〈Xmax〉 and σ(Xmax) allows one to obtain less model dependent information on the mass composition of UHECRs.”
The Muon Puzzle in cosmic-ray induced air showers and its connection to the Large Hadron Collider (2021, methodology): “2 left-hand side, predictions for 〈lnA〉 are shown for several proposed source classes (lines) (Kampert and Unger 2012, and references therein).”