About chemical composition of the primary cosmic radiation at ultra-high energies

TL;DR

This paper estimates the fluxes of various particles in extensive air showers caused by different primary cosmic ray nuclei, using simulations and detector data, to infer the chemical composition of ultra-high-energy cosmic radiation.

Contribution

It combines simulation results with detector data to analyze the chemical composition of primary cosmic rays at ultra-high energies.

Findings

Flux measurements vary slightly between different nuclei.

Detector readings suggest a predominance of lighter nuclei.

Results support the use of Cherenkov and muon detectors for composition analysis.

Abstract

The fluxes of electrons, positrons, gammas, Cherenkov photons and muons in individual extensive air showers induced by the primary protons and helium, oxygen and iron nuclei at the level of observation have been estimated with help of the code CORSICA 6.616. The comparison show that the values of the function Xi**2 per one degree of freedom changes from 1.1 for iron nuclei to 0.9 for primary protons. As this difference is small all readings of detectors of the Vavilov-Cherenkov radiation have been used. At last, readings of underground detectors of muons with energies above 1 GeV have been exploited to make definite conclusion about chemical composition.