Sensitivity of YAC to measure the light-component spectrum of primary cosmic rays at the "knee" energies

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that the combined YAC and Tibet-III array effectively measures the light component spectrum of primary cosmic rays at the knee energies, with simulations showing high accuracy and potential for detailed composition analysis.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new combined detector array and simulation method to accurately estimate the light component spectrum of cosmic rays at knee energies.

Findings

YAC-I+Tibet-III array can reproduce input spectra within 10% error.

Systematic errors are about 30%, mainly from primary and interaction models.

The array is effective for studying proton and helium spectra around knee energies.

Abstract

A new air-shower core-detector array (YAC : Yangbajing Air-shower Core-detector array) has been developed to measure the primary cosmic-ray composition at the "knee" energies in Tibet, China, focusing mainly on the light components. The prototype experiment (YAC-I) consisting of 16 detectors has been constructed and operated at Yangbajing (4300 m a.s.l.) in Tibet since May 2009. YAC-I is installed in the Tibet-III AS array and operates together. In this paper, we performed a Monte Carlo simulation to check the sensitivity of YAC-I+Tibet-III array to the cosmic-ray light component of cosmic rays around the knee energies, taking account of the observation conditions of actual YAC-I+Tibet-III array. The selection of light component from others was made by use of an artificial neural network (ANN). The simulation shows that the light-component spectrum estimated by our methods can well reproduce the input ones within 10\% error, and there will be about 30\% systematic errors mostly induced by the primary and interaction models used. It is found that the full-scale YAC and the Tibet-III array is powerful to study the cosmic-ray composition, in particular, to obtain the energy spectra of protons and helium nuclei around the knee energies.