Abstract
Above 1015 eV, the cosmic ray (CR) flux drops below a few tens of particles per square meter per year. It is no longer possible to detect the incident particles above the atmosphere before they interact. Direct experiments are thus replaced with ground-based instruments that cover up to several thousands of km2, the extensive air shower (EAS) arrays. A completely different experimental approach for CR measurements is used: EAS arrays are, in most cases, large area and long duration experiments studying, as accurately as possible, the nature, flux, mass, and direction of primary CRs up to the highest energies. This chapter describes: the developments of air showers initiated by primary protons and nuclei; the main shower features that characterize the electromagnetic and muonic components; some EAS array detectors using different experimental techniques; and the results obtained in knowledge of the CR flux in the energy region around the knee.
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Notes
- 1.
Before the LHC physics runs, someone expressed concerns over safety, and attempted to halt the beginning of the experiments through petitions to the US and European Courts. These opponents asserted that the LHC experiments had the potential to create micro black holes that could grow in mass or release dangerous radiation, leading to doomsday scenarios, such as the destruction of the Earth . Any doomsday scenario at the LHC was ruled out before starting of the physics runs, simply noting that the physical conditions and events created in the LHC experiments occur naturally and routinely in the Universe without hazardous consequences. In particular, ultra-high energy CRs that are impacting on Earth with energies considerably higher than those reached in any man-made collider have never destroyed the Earth!
- 2.
Two solutions exist, denoted as Approximation A when the electron excitation/ionization losses are neglected and Approximation B when they are included.
- 3.
A charged particle traversing a medium is deflected by many small-angle scatters. This deflection is due to the superposition of many Coulomb scatterings from individual nuclei, and hence the effect is called multiple Coulomb scattering . The Coulomb scattering distribution is well-represented by a Gaussian distribution. At larger angles, the distribution shows larger tails and the behavior is more similar to that of Rutherford scattering .
- 4.
The Γ function is an extension for positive real numbers of the factorial.
- 5.
The quantity n ch is more easily measured in accelerator experiments than n h.
- 6.
Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC) convert the height or the integral of an electronic signal into a digital number. For instance, the height of a signal between 0 and 5 V may be converted by a 10-bit ADC into a number between 0 and 210 − 1 = 1023. Flash-ADCs are very fast compared to other ADC types, so a single flash-ADC can be used to analyze various channels in sequence, or to analyze in a time-sequence the development of a pulse, functioning in this way as a Waveform Analyzer (WFA) .
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Spurio, M. (2018). Indirect Cosmic Ray Detection: Particle Showers in the Atmosphere. In: Probes of Multimessenger Astrophysics. Astronomy and Astrophysics Library. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96854-4_4
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