Reconstruction of Longitudinal Profiles of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Ray Showers from Fluorescence and Cherenkov Light Measurements

Abstract

We present a new method for the reconstruction of the longitudinal profile of extensive air showers induced by ultra-high energy cosmic rays. In contrast to the typically considered shower size profile, this method employs directly the ionization energy deposit of the shower particles in the atmosphere. Due to universality of the energy spectra of electrons and positrons, both fluorescence and Cherenkov light can be used simultaneously as signal to infer the shower profile from the detected light. The method is based on an analytic least-square solution for the estimation of the shower profile from the observed light signal. Furthermore, the extrapolation of the observed part of the profile with a Gaisser-Hillas function is discussed and the total statistical uncertainty of shower parameters like total energy and shower maximum is calculated.

accepted by NIM A

References in corpus (4)

• One-dimensional Hybrid Approach to Extensive Air Shower Simulation
• The Offline Software Framework of the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Energy Release in Air Showers
• Optimal transportation on non-compact manifolds

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Depth of Maximum of Air-Shower Profiles at the Pierre Auger Observatory: Measurements at Energies above 10^17.8 eV
• Cosmic Rays from the Knee to the Highest Energies
• Measurement of the cosmic-ray energy spectrum above $2.5\times 10^{18}$ eV using the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays from Black Hole Jets of Radio Galaxies
• The Rapid Atmospheric Monitoring System of the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Atmospheric multiple scattering of fluorescence and Cherenkov light emitted by extensive air showers
• The impact of the air-fluorescence yield on the reconstructed shower parameters of ultra-high energy cosmic rays
• Asymmetry of the angular distribution of Cherenkov photons of extensive air showers induced by the geomagnetic field
• An extended universality of electron distributions in cosmic ray showers of high energies and its application
• Parametrization of the angular distribution of Cherenkov light in air showers
• Simulation and Parameterization of Longitudinal Development in Extensive Air Showers for Different Hadronic Interaction Models