Observations of High Energy Cosmic-Ray Electrons from 30 GeV to 3 TeV with Emulsion Chambers

Abstract

We have performed a series of cosmic-ray electron observations using the balloon-borne emulsion chambers since 1968. While we previously reported the results from subsets of the exposures, the final results of the total exposures up to 2001 are presented here. Our successive experiments have yielded the total exposure of 8.19 m^2 sr day at the altitudes of 4.0 - 9.4 g/cm^2. The performance of the emulsion chambers was examined by accelerator beam tests and Monte-Carlo simulations, and the on-board calibrations were carried out by using the flight data. In this work we present the cosmic-ray electron spectrum in the energy range from 30 GeV to 3 TeV at the top of the atmosphere, which is well represented by a power-law function with an index of -3.28+-0.10. The observed data can be also interpreted in terms of diffusive propagation models. The evidence of cosmic-ray electrons up to 3 TeV suggests the existence of cosmic-ray electron sources at distances within ~1 kpc and times within ~1x10^5 yr ago.

38 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (8)

• Observation of an anomalous positron abundance in the cosmic radiation
• The cosmic-ray electron flux measured by the PAMELA experiment between 1 and 625 GeV
• Fermi LAT observations of cosmic-ray electrons from 7 GeV to 1 TeV
• Searches for Cosmic-Ray Electron Anisotropies with the Fermi Large Area Telescope
• Measurement of zero degree single photon energy spectra for sqrt(s) = 7TeV proton-proton collisions at LHC
• Possible structure in the cosmic ray electron spectrum measured by the ATIC-2 and ATIC-4 experiments
• Cosmic-ray spectra of primary protons and high altitude muons deconvolved from observed atmospheric gamma rays
• Atmospheric Electron Spectrum above 30 GeV at the high altitude

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• Cosmic-ray database update: ultra-high energy, ultra-heavy, and anti-nuclei cosmic-ray data (CRDB v4.0)
• First Measurement of the ${\nu }_e$ and ${\nu }_{\mu }$ Interaction Cross Sections at the LHC with FASER's Emulsion Detector
• Unravelling the richness of dark sector by FASER$\nu$
• Probing the astrophysical origin of high-energy cosmic-ray electrons with Monte Carlo simulation
• The electron plus positron spectrum from annihilation of Kaluza-Klein dark matter in the Galaxy
• Comparison with experimental data of different theoretical approaches to high-energy electron bremsstrahlung including quantum coherence effects