0000000000400525
AUTHOR
Livio Scarsi
Gamma Ray Astronomy - An Overview of the Galactic Diffuse Emission: The Origin and Confinement of Cosmic Rays
Gamma-ray Astronomy investigates the electromagnetic radiation coming from Outer Space in the energy range above~100 KeV, bordering and mixing on the low energy side with the upper end of X-Ray Astronomy; no limit is indicated on the high energy side if not that imposed by the vanishing intensity of the incoming flux (Fig.1).
The FIGARO II experiment: a general outline of the mission and the principal scientific results
The FIGARO II (French Italian Gamma-Ray Observatory) experiment has been launched successfully three times: in July 1986 from Milo (Trapani), in November 1988 from Charleville (Australia) and in July 1990 again from Milo. In the first flight the observational program was limited to the Crab pulsar PSR0531+21 only because of a telemetry failure: the high sensitivity of FIGARO II allowed an accurate study of the pulse shape as well as a phase-resolved spectroscopy. It was also possible to evaluate the dispersion measure of the Crab pulsar at the flight date from the time delay between gamma-ray and radio pulses. The major results of the second flight were a stringent upper limit to the low-en…
Rule-guided identification of cosmic-ray patterns in PLASTEX
Some techniques devised in the computer science fields of pattern recognition and expert systems are being applied to the interpretation of EAS responses in the PLASTEX experiment. An attempt is made to codity in a set of rules the expertise of trained researchers who are able to recognize and classify different hit patterns even in the presence of noisy background, and in spite of imperfections in the detector response. The patterns expected to be useful include, but are not limited to, track patterns. The software described here, as a progress report, automatically finds patterns corresponding to isolated tracks, and patterns composed of tracks that connect with each other in a layer of d…