0000000000585628
AUTHOR
Salvatore Giarrusso
Atmospheric Background Measurement in the 300–400 nm Band with a Balloon Borne Experiment during a Nocturnal Flight
The balloon borne experiment, named BABY (BAckground BYpass) belongs to a wider program, AIRWATCH-OWL, intended for the observation of high energy Cosmic Rays from space, detecting the faint UV fluorescence light emitted by the atmospheric Nitrogen as final result of a complex hadronic cascade. In this framework, one of the fundamental information concern the knowledge of the background level. This is one of the main parameters that contribute to the sensitivity of any kind of instrument. The apparatus used for the BABY experiment was designed and completely built at the IFCAI-CNR in Palermo. The instrument is composed by two filtered and collimated photomultipliers (PMT) that detect the UV…
Detection of the Cherenkov light diffused by sea water with the ULTRA experiment
The study of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays represents one of the most challenging topic in the Cosmic Rays and in the Astroparticle Physics fields. The interaction of primary particles with atmospheric nuclei produces a huge Extensive Air Shower together with isotropic emission of UV fluorescence light and highly directional Cherenkov photons, that are reflected/diffused isotropically by the impact on the Earth's surface or on high optical depth clouds. For space-based observations, detecting the reflected Cherenkov signal in a delayed coincidence with the fluorescence light improves the accuracy of the shower reconstruction in space and in particular the measurement of the shower maximum, …