AugerPrime: the Pierre Auger Observatory Upgrade

Abstract

The world largest exposure to ultra-high energy cosmic rays accumulated by the Pierre Auger Observatory led to major advances in our understanding of their properties, but the many unknowns about the nature and distribution of the sources, the primary composition and the underlying hadronic interactions prevent the emergence of a uniquely consistent picture. The new perspectives opened by the current results call for an upgrade of the Observatory, whose main aim is the collection of new information about the primary mass of the highest energy cosmic rays on a shower-by-shower basis. The evaluation of the fraction of light primaries in the region of suppression of the flux will open the window to charged particle astronomy, allowing for composition-selected anisotropy searches. In addition, the properties of multiparticle production will be studied at energies not covered by man-made accelerators and new or unexpected changes of hadronic interactions will be searched for. After a discussion of the motivations for upgrading the Pierre Auger Observatory, a description of the detector upgrade is provided. We then discuss the expected performances and the improved physics sensitivity of the upgraded detectors and present the first data collected with the already running Engineering Array.

9 pages, 11 figures, presented at UHECR 2018 (Paris, Oct 2018)

References in corpus (4)

• Observation of a Large-scale Anisotropy in the Arrival Directions of Cosmic Rays above $8\times 10^{18}$ eV
• Testing Hadronic Interactions at Ultrahigh Energies with Air Showers Measured by the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Evidence for a mixed mass composition at the `ankle' in the cosmic-ray spectrum
• Layered water Cherenkov detector for the study of ultra high energy cosmic rays

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Searches for Ultra-High-Energy Photons at the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Full-sky searches for anisotropies in UHECR arrival directions with the Pierre Auger Observatory and the Telescope Array
• Science with the Global Cosmic-ray Observatory (GCOS)
• The Radio Detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory -- status and expected performance
• Validation of high voltage power supplies for the 1-inch photomultipliers of AugerPrime, the Pierre Auger Observatory upgrade
• Measurements and tests of hadronic interactions at ultra-high energies with the Pierre Auger Observatory