Heidelberg 2022 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 51: Experimental Techniques in Astroparticle Physics 2

T 51.4: Talk

Tuesday, March 22, 2022, 17:00–17:15, T-H36

Separation of muonic and electromagnetic signals using the upgraded detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory — •Allan Machado Payeras^1,2, Anderson Campos Fauth², Darko Veberic¹, and David Schmidt¹ — ¹Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany — ²University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil

The Pierre Auger Observatory detects extensive air showers (EAS), produced by high-energy cosmic rays. Its surface detector (SD) is composed of 1660 water-Cherenkov detectors (WCD) disposed in a triangular grid with a spacing of 1500 m between nearest neighbours. At the moment, the Observatory is being upgraded with the main addition of a surface scintillation detector (SSD), which will be installed on top of each WCD. The main goal of the upgrade is to obtain data sensitive to the composition of the primary cosmic rays, which is necessary to understand the astrophysical origin of these particles. In this work, we have studied a method to obtain a separation of signals due to the electromagnetic and muonic components of EAS, using the responses of the WCD and SSD. Such separation is the key to obtain composition-sensitive information from the new dataset. The signals of each of the components were modelled for the detectors and, using Monte Carlo simulation of both EASs and of the detector responses, we studied the reconstruction of the components for different distances to the shower axis, energies and zenith angles of the primaries. We assessed the reconstruction precision of the different components not only for the total signal, but also for its time structure.