Volume 301 - 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2017) - Session Cosmic-Ray Indirect. CRI-properties of CRs at high energies (anisotropy, energy, mass)
Estimate of the energy spectrum of the light component of cosmic rays in HAWC using the shower age and the fraction of hit PMT’s
J.C. Arteaga-Velázquez,* Z. Hampel-Arias, J.D. Álvarez on behalf of the HAWC Collaboration
*corresponding author
Full text: pdf
Pre-published on: August 16, 2017
Published on: August 03, 2018
Abstract
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory is a ground-based air-shower detector designed to study the TeV gamma and cosmic ray windows. The observatory is composed of a densely packed array of $300$ water Cherenkov tanks, $4.5$ m deep and $7.3$ diameter with $4$ photomultipliers (PMT) each, distributed on a $22,000 \, \mbox{m}^2$ surface. The instrument registers the number of hit PMT's as well as the timing information and the total charge seen by the photomultipliers during the shower event. From the analysis of these data, shower observables such as the arrival direction, the core position at ground, the age and the primary energy are estimated, from which the energy spectrum of cosmic rays and its composition can be studied. In this work, we will describe the methodologies of HAWC cosmic ray analyses, including the Bayesian spectral unfolding procedure used to determine the all-particle and the light component energy spectra of cosmic rays. We will see that the distribution of the shower age vs the fraction of hit PMT's contains information about the composition of cosmic rays.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.301.0501
How to cite

Metadata are provided both in "article" format (very similar to INSPIRE) as this helps creating very compact bibliographies which can be beneficial to authors and readers, and in "proceeding" format which is more detailed and complete.

Open Access