Enhancing the Pierre Auger Observatory to the 10^{17} to 10^{18.5} eV Range: Capabilities of an Infill Surface Array

Abstract

The Pierre Auger Observatory has been designed to study the highest-energy cosmic rays in nature (E > 10^{18.5} eV). The determination of their arrival direction, energy and composition is performed by the analysis of the atmospheric showers they produce. The Auger Surface Array will consist of 1600 water Cerenkov detectors placed in an equilateral triangular grid of 1.5 km spacing. The aim of this paper is to show that the addition of a "small" area of surface detectors at half or less the above mentioned spacing would allow a dramatic increase of the physical scope of this Observatory, reaching lower energies at which the transition from galactic to extragalactic sources is expected.

arXiv comment21 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Nucl. Instr. & Meth. in Phys. Res. A

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Cosmic Rays from the Knee to the Highest Energies
• Transition from galactic to extragalactic cosmic rays
• Propagation of high-energy cosmic rays in extragalactic turbulent magnetic fields: resulting energy spectrum and composition
• Signatures of the extragalactic cosmic-ray source composition from spectrum and shower depth measurements
• A new composition-sensitive parameter for Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays
• A new method for reconstructing the muon lateral distribution with an array of segmented counters
• High energy cosmic-ray interactions with particles from the Sun
• Energy determination of cosmic ray showers in surface arrays using signal inference at a single distance from the core