Calibration of the Air Shower Energy Scale of the Water and Air Cherenkov Techniques in the LHAASO experiment

Abstract

The Wide Field-of-View Cherenkov Telescope Array (WFCTA) and the Water Cherenkov Detector Arrays (WCDA) of LHAASO are designed to work in combination for measuring the energy spectra of various cosmic ray species over a very wide energy range from a few TeV to 10 PeV. The energy calibration of WCDA can be achieved with a proven technique of measuring the westward shift of the Moon shadow of galactic cosmic rays due to the geomagnetic field. This deflection angle $\Delta$ is inversely proportional to the energy of the cosmic rays. The precise measurements of the shifts by WCDA allows us to calibrate its energy scale for energies as high as 35 TeV. The energy scale measured by WCDA can be used to cross calibrate the energy reconstructed by WFCTA, which spans the whole energy range up to 10 PeV. In this work, we will demonstrate the feasibility of the method using the data collected from April 2019 to January 2020 by the WFCTA array and WCDA-1 detector, the first of the three water Cherenkov ponds, already commissioned at LHAASO site.

References in corpus (6)

• Measurement of the cosmic-ray proton spectrum from 40 GeV to 100 TeV with the DAMPE satellite
• Measurement of the cosmic ray helium energy spectrum from 70 GeV to 80 TeV with the DAMPE space mission
• The observation of the Crab Nebula with LHAASO-KM2A for the performance study
• Observation of the Cosmic Ray Moon shadowing effect with ARGO-YBJ
• Construction and On-site Performance of the LHAASO WFCTA Camera
• Performance of LHAASO-WCDA and Observation of Crab Nebula as a Standard Candle

Cited by in corpus (3)

• MAGIC observations provide compelling evidence of the hadronic multi-TeV emission from the putative PeVatron SNR G106.3+2.7
• Prospects for the detection of gamma rays using Cherenkov telescopes enhanced by a ground array observatory
• Energy calibration of LHAASO-KM2A using the cosmic ray Moon shadow