The field of view of a scintillator pair for cosmic rays

TL;DR

This paper investigates the angular acceptance of scintillator pairs for detecting cosmic rays, verifying theoretical distributions with experimental data to improve understanding of air shower origins.

Contribution

It verifies the theoretical acceptance distribution of scintillator pairs using experimental data from perpendicular detector setups.

Findings

Theoretical acceptance distributions match experimental data.

Perpendicular detector pairs effectively describe EAS origin distributions.

Method improves cosmic ray air shower reconstruction accuracy.

Abstract

Particles in an extended air shower (EAS), initiated by a cosmic ray primary, lead to two nearly simultaneous detections in a scintillator pair. The angle of the EAS and the axis through both scintillators can be reconstructed using the time difference of the detections and the distance between the scintillators. The acceptances of a scintillator along the axis through the scintillators and perpendicularly on this axis follow the same distribution in theory. Using a data set with two perpendicular detector pairs this theory is verified. The distribution of possible origins of cosmic ray primaries, and the resulting EAS, can thus be described using the perpendicular distribution for a given time difference.