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On the energy determination of extensive air showers through the fluorescence technique

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 Added by Ricardo Vazquez
 Publication date 2003
  fields Physics
and research's language is English




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The determination of the shower development in air using fluorescence yield is subject to corrections due to the angular spread of the particles in the shower. This could introduce systematic errors in the energy determination of an extensive air shower through the fluorescence technique.



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Charged particles of extensive air showers (EAS), mainly electrons and positrons, initiate the emission of fluorescence light in the Earths atmosphere. This light provides a calorimetric measurement of the energy of cosmic rays. For reconstructing the primary energy from an observed light track of an EAS, the fluorescence yield in air has to be known in dependence on atmospheric conditions, like air temperature, pressure, and humidity. Several experiments on fluorescence emission have published various sets of data covering different parts of the dependence of the fluorescence yield on atmospheric conditions. Using a compilation of published measurements, a calculation of the fluorescence yield in dependence on altitude is presented. The fluorescence calculation is applied to simulated air showers and different atmospheric profiles to estimate the influence of the atmospheric conditions on the reconstructed shower parameters.
Recent measurements suggest free electrons created in ultra-high energy cosmic ray extensive air showers (EAS) can interact with neutral air molecules producing Bremsstrahlung radiation in the microwave regime. The microwave radiation produced is expected to scale with the number of free electrons in the shower, which itself is a function of the energy of the primary particle and atmospheric depth. Using these properties a calorimetric measurement of the EAS is possible. This technique is analogous to fluorescence detection with the added benefit of a nearly 100% duty cycle and practically no atmospheric attenuation. The Microwave Detection of Air Showers (MIDAS) prototype is currently being developed at the University of Chicago. MIDAS consists of a 53 feed receiver operating in the 3.4 to 4.2 GHz band. The camera is deployed on a 4.5 meter parabolic reflector and is instrumented with high speed power detectors and autonomous FPGA trigger electronics. We present the current status of the MIDAS instrument and an outlook for future development.
The understanding of the basic properties of the ultra - high energy extensive air showers is strongly dependent on the description of the hadronic interactions in a energy range beyond that probed by the LHC. One of the uncertainties present in the modeling of the air showers is the treatment of diffractive interactions, which are dominated by non - perturbative physics and usually described by phenomenological models. These interactions are expect to affect the development of the air showers, since they provide a way of transporting substantial amounts of energy deep in the atmosphere, modifying the global characteristics of the shower profile. In this paper we investigate the impact of the diffractive interactions in the observables that can be measured in hadronic collisions at high energies and ultra - high energy cosmic ray interactions. We consider three distinct phenomenological models for the treatment of diffractive physics and estimate the influence of these interactions on the elasticity, number of secondaries, longitudinal air shower profiles and muon densities for proton - air and iron - air collisions at different primary energies. Our results demonstrate that the diffractive events has a non - negligible effect on the observables and that the distinct approaches for these interactions, present in the phenomenological models, are an important source of theoretical uncertainty for the description of the extensive air showers.
We summarise some basic issues relevant to the optimisation and design of space-based experiments for the observation of the Extensive Air Showers produced by Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Particles interacting with the atmosphere. A number of basic relations is derived and discussed with a twofold goal: defining requirements for the experimental apparatus and estimating the exptected performance.
In order to examine a muon excess observed by the Pierre Auger Observatory, detailed Monte Carlo simulations were carried out for primary protons, iron nuclei and strangelets (hypothetical stable lumps of strange quark matter). We obtained a rough agreement between the simulations and the data for ordinary nuclei without any contribution of strangelets in primary flux of cosmic rays. Our simulations suggest that the shower observables are dominated by details of hadronic interaction models.
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