Determination of the mass and energy of primary cosmic rays above 100 TeV

Abstract

This analysis aims to determine the mass composition and energy of cosmic rays at energies above 100 TeV based on the lateral distribution of extensive air showers. Here, we propose quite a few air shower observables for reconstructing the mass and energy of the primary particles. The present reconstruction uses a detailed Monte Carlo simulation for cosmic ray induced air showers in KASCADE and NBU types surface arrays of particle detectors. Some of the observables obtained from this analysis of simulated data are used to infer the nature of the primary particles from a comparison with KASCADE and/or NBU data. It is expected that the determination of primary energy of a cosmic-ray shower may deliver a better accuracy compared to standalone analysis using shower size or S600 or S500 or $N_{\mathrm{pe}}$ etc, owing to strong fluctuations in the EAS development. Moreover, the present study might be useful to discriminate between hadronic cosmic rays and primary gamma rays, and to measure the cosmic ray all-particle energy spectrum.

arXiv comment16 pages, 12 figures, accepted manuscript

References in corpus (12)

• KASCADE measurements of energy spectra for elemental groups of cosmic rays: Results and open problems
• Parton Ladder Splitting and the Rapidity Dependence of Transverse Momentum Spectra in Deuteron-Gold Collisions at RHIC
• Kneelike structure in the spectrum of the heavy component of cosmic rays observed with KASCADE-Grande
• New facts about muon production in Extended Air Shower simulations
• The Knee of the Cosmic Hydrogen and Helium Spectrum below 1 PeV Measured by ARGO-YBJ and a Cherenkov Telescope of LHAASO
• Absorption of Very High Energy Gamma Rays in the Milky Way
• Transition from galactic to extragalactic cosmic rays
• Universality of electron-positron distributions in extensive air showers
• Influence of shower fluctuations and primary composition on studies of the shower longitudinal development
• Origin of Galactic Cosmic Rays
• Slope of the lateral density function of extensive air showers around the knee region as an indicator of shower age
• GRBs search results with the ARGO-YBJ experiment operated in Scaler Mode