No Arabic abstract
A new hybrid experiment has been started by AS{gamma} experiment at Tibet, China, since August 2011, which consists of a low threshold burst-detector-grid (YAC-II, Yangbajing Air shower Core array), the Tibet air-shower array (Tibet-III) and a large underground water Cherenkov muon detector (MD). In this paper, the capability of the measurement of the chemical components (proton, helium and iron) with use of the (Tibet-III+YAC-II) is investigated by means of an extensive Monte Carlo simulation in which the secondary particles are propagated through the (Tibet-III+YAC-II) array and an artificial neural network (ANN) method is applied for the primary mass separation. Our simulation shows that the new installation is powerful to study the chemical compositions, in particular, to obtain the primary energy spectrum of the major component at the knee.
The hybrid Tibet AS array was successfully constructed in 2014. It has 4500 m$^{2}$ underground water Cherenkov pools used as the muon detector (MD) and 789 scintillator detectors covering 36900 m$^{2}$ as the surface array. At 100 TeV, cosmic-ray background events can be rejected by approximately 99.99%, according to the full Monte Carlo (MC) simulation for $gamma$-ray observations. In order to use the muon detector efficiently, we propose to extend the surface array area to 72900 m$^{2}$ by adding 120 scintillator detectors around the current array to increase the effective detection area. A new prototype scintillator detector is developed via optimizing the detector geometry and its optical surface, by selecting the reflective material and adopting dynode readout. This detector can meet our physics requirements with a positional non-uniformity of the output charge within 10% (with reference to the center of the scintillator), time resolution FWHM of $sim$2.2 ns, and dynamic range from 1 to 500 minimum ionization particles.
Low energy ground-based cosmic ray air shower experiments generally have energy threshold in the range of a few tens to a few hundreds of TeV. The shower observables are measured indirectly with an array of detectors. The atmospheric absorption of low energy secondaries limits their detection frequencies at the Earths surface. However, due to selection effects, a tiny fraction of low energy showers, which are produced in the lower atmosphere can reach the observational level. But, due to less information of shower observables, the reconstruction of these showers are arduous. Hence, it is believed that direct measurements by experiments aboard on satellites and balloon flights are more reliable at low energies. Despite having very small efficiency ($sim$0.1%) at low energies, the large acceptance ($sim$5 m$^2$sr) of GRAPES-3 experiment allows observing primary cosmic rays down below to $sim$1 TeV and opens up the possibility to measure primary energy spectrum spanning from a few TeV to beyond cosmic ray knee (up to 10$^{16}$ eV), covering five orders of magnitude. The GRAPES-3 energy threshold for primary protons through Monte Carlo simulations are calculated, which gives reasonably good agreement with data. Furthermore, the total efficiencies and acceptance are also calculated for protons primaries. The ability of GRAPES-3 experiment to cover such a broader energy range may provide a unique handle to bridge the energy spectrum between direct measurements at low energies and indirect measurements at ultra-high energies.
A new EAS hybrid experiment has been designed by constructing a YAC (Yangbajing Air shower Core) detector array inside the existing Tibet-III air shower array. The first step of YAC, called YAC-I, consists of 16 plastic scintillator units (4 rows times 4 columns) each with an area of 40 cm * 50 cm which is used to check hadronic interaction models used in AS simulations. A Monte Carlo study shows that YAC-I can record high energy electromagnetic component in the core region of air showers induced by primary particles of several tens TeV energies where the primary composition is directly measured by space experiments. It may provide a direct check of the hadronic interaction models currently used in the air shower simulations in the corresponding energy region. In present paper, the method of the observation and the sensitivity of the characteristics of the observed events to the different interaction models are discussed.
A common problem in ultra-high energy cosmic ray physics is the comparison of energy spectra. The question is whether the spectra from two experiments or two regions of the sky agree within their statistical and systematic uncertainties. We develop a method to directly compare energy spectra for ultra-high energy cosmic rays from two different regions of the sky in the same experiment without reliance on agreement with a theoretical model of the energy spectra. The consistency between the two spectra is expressed in terms of a Bayes factor, defined here as the ratio of the likelihood of the two-parent source hypothesis to the likelihood of the one-parent source hypothesis. Unlike other methods, for example chi^2 tests, the Bayes factor allows for the calculation of the posterior odds ratio and correctly accounts for non-Gaussian uncertainties. The latter is particularly important at the highest energies, where the number of events is very small.
The paper investigates the overall and detailed features of cosmic ray (CR) spectra in the knee region using the scenario of nuclei-photon interactions around the acceleration sources. Young supernova remnants can be the physical realities of such kind of CR acceleration sites. The results show that the model can well explain the following problems simultaneously with one set of source parameters: the knee of CR spectra and the sharpness of the knee, the detailed irregular structures of CR spectra, the so-called component B of Galactic CRs, and the electron/positron excesses reported by recent observations. The coherent explanation serves as evidence that at least a portion of CRs might be accelerated at the sources similar to young supernova remnants, and one set of source parameters indicates that this portion mainly comes from standard sources or from a single source.