The cosmic ray proton plus helium energy spectrum measured by the ARGO-YBJ experiment in the energy range 3-300 TeV

Abstract

The ARGO-YBJ experiment is a full-coverage air shower detector located at the Yangbajing Cosmic Ray Observatory (Tibet, People's Republic of China, 4300 m a.s.l.). The high altitude, combined with the full-coverage technique, allows the detection of extensive air showers in a wide energy range and offer the possibility of measuring the cosmic ray proton plus helium spectrum down to the TeV region, where direct balloon/space-borne measurements are available. The detector has been in stable data taking in its full configuration from November 2007 to February 2013. In this paper the measurement of the cosmic ray proton plus helium energy spectrum is presented in the region 3-300 TeV by analyzing the full collected data sample. The resulting spectral index is $\gamma =-2.64\pm 0.01$. These results demonstrate the possibility of performing an accurate measurement of the spectrum of light elements with a ground based air shower detector.

18 pages, 8 figures, preprint submitted to Phys. Rev. D

References in corpus (4)

• Cosmic-Ray Proton and Helium Spectra from the First CREAM Flight
• Primary particle acceleration above 100 TeV in the shell-type Supernova Remnant RX J1713.7-3946 with deep H.E.S.S. observations
• Observation of the Cosmic Ray Moon shadowing effect with ARGO-YBJ
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