Detecting filaments in the ultra-high energy cosmic ray distribution

Abstract

We propose and test new statistical tools to study the distribution of cosmic rays based on the use of the Minimal Spanning Tree. The method described is particularly sensitive to filamentary structures, as those expected to arise from strong sources of charged cosmic rays which get deflected by intervening magnetic fields. We also test the method with data available from the AGASA and SUGAR surface detector arrays.

arXiv commentminor changes, matching the published version in Astroparticle Physics

References in corpus (11)

• Small-scale anisotropy of cosmic rays above 10^19eV observed with the Akeno Giant Air Shower Array
• Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Ray Probes of Large Scale Structure and Magnetic Fields
• The Anisotropy of Cosmic Ray Arrival Direction around 10^18eV
• Cosmic Ray Anisotropy Analysis with a Full-Sky Observatory
• The Anisotropy of Cosmic Ray Arrival Directions around 10${}^{18}$eV
• The toes of the ultra high energy cosmic ray spectrum
• Mapping deflections of extragalactic Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays in magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the Local Universe
• Southern Hemisphere Observations of a $10^{18}$eV Cosmic Ray Source Near the Direction of the Galactic Centre
• Lensing of ultra-high energy cosmic rays in turbulent magnetic fields
• Study of Small-Scale Anisotropy of Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays Observed in Stereo by HiRes
• Astrophysical magnetic field reconstruction and spectroscopy with ultra high energy cosmic rays

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Identifying star clusters in a field: A comparison of different algorithms
• Source position reconstruction and constraints on the galactic magnetic field from ultra-high energy cosmic rays
• Anisotropy expectations for ultra-high-energy cosmic rays with future high statistics experiments
• Visualizing the pulsar population using graph theory
• Using spherical wavelets to search for magnetically-induced alignment in the arrival directions of ultra-high energy cosmic rays
• A Three-Point Cosmic Ray Anisotropy Method