The impact of the air-fluorescence yield on the reconstructed shower parameters of ultra-high energy cosmic rays

TL;DR

This paper examines how variations in fluorescence yield data, influenced by atmospheric conditions like humidity and temperature, affect the accuracy of reconstructing cosmic ray shower parameters such as energy and depth.

Contribution

It introduces a method to evaluate the impact of different fluorescence yield assumptions on shower reconstruction, considering atmospheric dependencies.

Findings

Water vapor and temperature significantly affect fluorescence yield.

Variations in yield data lead to measurable differences in energy and depth estimates.

The proposed method quantifies these effects for improved cosmic ray analysis.

Abstract

An accurate knowledge of the fluorescence yield and its dependence on atmospheric properties such as pressure, temperature or humidity is essential to obtain a reliable measurement of the primary energy of cosmic rays in experiments using the fluorescence technique. In this work, several sets of fluorescence yield data (i.e. absolute value and quenching parameters) are described and compared. A simple procedure to study the effect of the assumed fluorescence yield on the reconstructed shower parameters (energy and shower maximum depth) as a function of the primary features has been developed. As an application, the effect of water vapor and temperature dependence of the collisional cross section on the fluorescence yield and its impact on the reconstruction of primary energy and shower maximum depth has been studied.