Energy calibration of LHAASO-KM2A using the cosmic ray Moon shadow

Abstract

We present a precise measurement of the westward, rigidity-dependent shift of the Moon's shadow using three and a half years of cosmic-ray data collected by the Kilometer Square Array (KM2A) of the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). These measurements enable us to calibrate the detector energy response in the range 20-260 TeV, with results showing excellent agreement with the response derived from Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of the KM2A detector. We also measure a best-fit parameter $\epsilon =0.015\pm 0.08$, corresponding to a 95% confidence interval of [-14%, +17%] for the energy-scale estimation. This result establishes the exceptional accuracy of the KM2A-MC in simulating the detector's response within this energy range.

12 pages, 13 figures, 2 tables

References in corpus (6)

• Measurement of the cosmic-ray proton spectrum from 40 GeV to 100 TeV with the DAMPE satellite
• Observation of the Cosmic Ray Moon shadowing effect with ARGO-YBJ
• Measurements of All-Particle Energy Spectrum and Mean Logarithmic Mass of Cosmic Rays from 0.3 to 30 PeV with LHAASO-KM2A
• Moon Shadow by Cosmic Rays under the Influence of Geomagnetic Field and Search for Antiprotons at Multi-TeV Energies
• Calibration of the Air Shower Energy Scale of the Water and Air Cherenkov Techniques in the LHAASO experiment
• LHAASO-KM2A detector simulation using Geant4