0000000000428671
AUTHOR
M.p. Panetta
A 3-Year Sample of Almost 1,600 Elves Recorded Above South America by the Pierre Auger Cosmic-Ray Observatory
The time and location of the 1,598 verified and reconstructed elves, used for the analysis showcased in this paper, are publicly available on the website of the Pierre Auger Observatory (https://www.auger.org/ index.php/science/data). We wish to thank the World Wide Lightning Location Network (http://wwlln.net), a collaboration among over 50 universities and institutions, for providing the lightning location data used in this paper. We acknowledge Robert Marshall for providing one of the most advanced elve simulations to the public, a key tool in understanding the elves observed by the Pierre Auger Observatory. The successful installation, commissioning, and operation of the Pierre Auger Ob…
Reconstruction of events recorded with the surface detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory
Cosmic rays arriving at Earth collide with the upper parts of the atmosphere, thereby inducing extensive air showers. When secondary particles from the cascade arrive at the ground, they are measured by surface detector arrays. We describe the methods applied to the measurements of the surface detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory to reconstruct events with zenith angles less than 60 using the timing and signal information recorded using the water-Cherenkov detector stations. In addition, we assess the accuracy of these methods in reconstructing the arrival directions of the primary cosmic ray particles and the sizes of the induced showers.
Studies on the response of a water-Cherenkov detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory to atmospheric muons using an RPC hodoscope
Extensive air showers, originating from ultra-high energy cosmic rays, have been successfully measured through the use of arrays of water-Cherenkov detectors (WCDs). Sophisticated analyses exploiting WCD data have made it possible to demonstrate that shower simulations, based on different hadronic-interaction models, cannot reproduce the observed number of muons at the ground. The accurate knowledge of the WCD response to muons is paramount in establishing the exact level of this discrepancy. In this work, we report on a study of the response of a WCD of the Pierre Auger Observatory to atmospheric muons performed with a hodoscope made of resistive plate chambers (RPCs), enabling us to selec…