The shower size parameter as estimator of extensive air shower energy in fluorescence telescopes

Abstract

The fluorescence technique has been successfully used to detect ultrahigh energy cosmic rays by indirect measurements. The underlying idea is that the number of charged particles in the atmospheric shower, i.e, its longitudinal profile, can be extracted from the amount of emitted nitrogen fluorescence light. However the influence of shower fluctuations and the very possible presence of different nuclear species in the primary cosmic ray spectrum makes the estimate of the shower energy from the fluorescence data analysis a difficult task. We investigate the potential of shower size at maximum depth as estimator of shower energy. The detection of the fluorescence light is simulated in detail and the reconstruction biases are carefully analyzed. We extend our calculations to both HiRes and EUSO experiments. This approach has shown some advantages to the reconstruction of the energy when compared to the standard analysis procedure.

References in corpus (5)

• Determination of the calorimetric energy in extensive air showers
• Primary Particle Type of the Most Energetic Fly's Eye Air Shower
• Influence of shower fluctuations and primary composition on studies of the shower longitudinal development
• Longitudinal development of extensive air showers: hybrid code SENECA and full Monte Carlo
• Acceptance of fluorescence detectors and its implication in energy spectrum inference at the highest energies

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Statistical methods applied to composition studies of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays
• Estimating primary energy of cosmic rays by calculating secondary particles density in optimum distance from shower core