Detection of high energy cosmic rays with the resonant gravitational wave detector NAUTILUS and EXPLORER
arXiv:0806.1335 · doi:10.1016/j.astropartphys.2008.09.002
Abstract
The cryogenic resonant gravitational wave detectors NAUTILUS and EXPLORER, made of an aluminum alloy bar, can detect cosmic ray showers. At temperatures above 1 K, when the material is in the normal conducting state, the measured signals are in good agreement with the values expected based on the cosmic rays data and on the thermo-acoustic model. When NAUTILUS was operated at the temperature of 0.14 K, in superconductive state, large signals produced by cosmic ray interactions, more energetic than expected, were recorded. The NAUTILUS data in this case are in agreement with the measurements done by a dedicated experiment on a particle beam. The biggest recorded event was in EXPLORER and excited the first longitudinal mode to a vibrational energy of about 670 K, corresponding to about 360 TeV absorbed in the bar. Cosmic rays can be an important background in future acoustic detectors of improved sensitivity. At present, they represent a useful tool to verify the gravitational wave antenna performance.
arXiv commentsubmitted to Astroparticle Physics
References in corpus (5)
- Sensitivity of the spherical gravitational wave detector MiniGRAIL operating at 5 K
- Increasing the bandwidth of resonant gravitational antennas: The case of Explorer
- Measurement of the cosmic ray hadron spectrum up to 30 TeV at mountain altitude: the primary proton spectrum
- Principles of wide bandwidth acoustic detectors and the single-mass DUAL detector
- Particle acoustic detection in gravitational wave aluminum resonant antennas
Cited by in corpus (8)
- Rare Events Detected with a Bulk Acoustic Wave High Frequency Gravitational Wave Antenna
- Resonant bar detector constraints on macro dark matter
- Dark Matter searches using gravitational wave bar detectors: quark nuggets and newtorites
- Analysis of 3 years of data from the gravitational wave detectors EXPLORER and NAUTILUS
- Experimental study of high energy electron interactions in a superconducting aluminum alloy resonant bar
- Correlated frequency noise in a multimode acoustic resonator
- Vibrational excitation induced by electron beam and cosmic rays in normal and superconductive aluminum bars
- SGR 1806-20 and the gravitational wave detectors EXPLORER and NAUTILUS