Determination of the mass and energy of primary cosmic rays above 100 TeV

TL;DR

This paper develops a method using extensive air shower observables and Monte Carlo simulations to accurately determine the mass composition and energy of cosmic rays above 100 TeV, improving discrimination and spectrum measurement.

Contribution

It introduces a new set of air shower observables and a detailed simulation-based reconstruction method for primary cosmic ray mass and energy above 100 TeV.

Findings

Enhanced accuracy in primary energy determination.

Potential to discriminate between hadronic and gamma-ray primaries.

Improved cosmic ray spectrum measurement.

Abstract

This analysis aims to determine the mass composition and energy of cosmic rays at energies above 100 TeV based on the lateral distribution of extensive air showers. Here, we propose quite a few air shower observables for reconstructing the mass and energy of the primary particles. The present reconstruction uses a detailed Monte Carlo simulation for cosmic ray induced air showers in KASCADE and NBU types surface arrays of particle detectors. Some of the observables obtained from this analysis of simulated data are used to infer the nature of the primary particles from a comparison with KASCADE and/or NBU data. It is expected that the determination of primary energy of a cosmic-ray shower may deliver a better accuracy compared to standalone analysis using shower size or S600 or S500 or $N_{\rm {pe}}$ etc, owing to strong fluctuations in the EAS development. Moreover, the present study might be useful to discriminate between hadronic cosmic rays and primary gamma rays, and to measure the cosmic ray all-particle energy spectrum.