ground detectors for the study of cosmic ray showersvillasen/articulos_constancias_sni2009/...ground...

Ground Detectors for the Study of Cosmic Ray Showers

H. SALAZAR1, L. VILLASENOR2 1Facultad de Ciencias Fisico-Matematicas, BUAP, Puebla, Pue., 72000, Mexico

2Instituto de Fisica y Matematicas, UMSNH, Morelia, Michoacan, 58040, Mexico

[email protected]

Abstract. We describe the work that we have done over the last decade to design and construct instruments to measure properties of cosmic rays in Mexico. We describe the detection of decaying and crossing muons in a water Cherenkov detector and discuss an application of these results to calibrate water Cherenkov detectors. We also describe a technique to separate isolated isolated muons and electrons in water Cherenkov detector. Next we describe the design and performance of a hybrid extensive air shower detector array built on the Campus of the University of Puebla (19oN, 90oW, 800 g/cm2) to measure the energy, arrival direction and composition of primary cosmic rays with energies around 1 PeV.

1. Calibration and monitoring of the Auger Observatory water Cherenkov detectors with stopping and crossing muons

1.1. Introduction The Auger Observatory detects cosmic rays reaching the earth with energies above 1019 eV [1] to study the origin and nature of these cosmic rays by measuring their energy spectra, arrival direction and composition. The inherent acceleration mechanism is one of the biggest and oldest mysteries in astrophysics. The Auger Observatory in the southern hemisphere will consists of 1600 water Cherenkov detectors (WCD) spread in a triangular grid over an area of 3000 km2. At present 75% of these detectors are operational. The Auger Observatory uses hybrid detection techniques: In addition to the ground detectors, four fluorescence eyes measure the longitudinal development of air shower cascades. At present all of these telescopes are fully operational, however, they are used only on clear and moonless nights. The Auger WCDs consist of cylindrical tanks of 10 m2 cross sections filled with purified water up to a height of 1.2 m. They possess three 8” PMTs looking downwards at the tank volume from the water surface. For a surface array as big as this one it is important to calibrate and monitor all the ground detectors in a remote way. In this section we present experimental results that validate a technique to perform these tasks, it is based on the fact that low-energy muons, with energies up to about 300 MeV, can stop and decay inside the water volume of the detectors. These muons abound as secondary cosmic ray particles reaching the surface detectors. The technique described here is based on the detection of muon-decay

Second School on Cosmic Rays and Astrophysics IOP PublishingJournal of Physics: Conference Series 116 (2008) 012008 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/116/1/012008

c© 2008 IOP Publishing Ltd 1

events inside the sensitive volume of the detectors. The muon-decay signal is characterized by two consecutive pulses from the PMTs. The muon-decay trigger that we implemented for this purpose requires the coincidence of two consecutive pulses from the detector PMTs within a time window of 25.6 µs: the first pulse corresponds to the stopping muon, and the second to the decay electron. We found that an effective muon-decay trigger can be made by requiring that the charge of the second pulse be greater than that of the first one, and the time between the two pulses be less than 8 µs.

1.2. Experimental setup

The set up of the water Cherenkov detector prototype we used consists of a cylindrical tank made of polyethylene with an inner diameter of 1.54 m filled with commercially purified water up to a height of 1.2 m. It has a single 8” PMT (Hamamatsu R1408), located at the center of the tank to collect the Cherenkov light produced; the PMT is located at the water surface with its photocathode window immersed in the water and looking downwards. The inner surface of the tank, including top and bottom, was covered with a highly reflective tyvec sheet. The tyvec reflectivity is about 90\% in the 300-500 nm region of the electromagnetic spectrum where the PMT quantum efficiency is appreciable. The tank was optically sealed to prevent light leaks.

Figure 1. Experimental setup for detecting muons crossing the WCD vertically and for detecting muon decaying inside the water tank.

Two slightly different experimental setups were used for this work: one for detecting muons decaying inside the detector and the other for detecting muons crossing the detector vertically. The main difference between them is the way in which the trigger is done. In the first case the trigger is given by the coincidence of two consecutive pulses from the tank PMT within a time window of 25.6 µs. In the second case the trigger is given by the time coincidence of the two PMT pulses from two scintillation counters placed vertically, one above and the other below the tank, in a time window of 100 ns.


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The PMT signal was transmitted via RG58 coaxial cable to a digital oscilloscope, Tektronix TDS220, and to a commercial NIM discriminator module with a discrimination threshold set to -30 mV. The high voltage of the PMT was 1.38 kV, giving rise to a single-pulse rate of 800 Hz for the water Cherenkov detector of 1.86 m2 cross section, i.e., 430 Hz/m2. A custom-made CAMAC TDC module was used to measure the time interval between consecutive pulses coming out of the discriminator; this module provided the trigger signal as well. The CAMAC controller used, LeCroy 8901, was connected to a National Instruments GPIB port on a PC. The DAQ program was written in LabView [2]. The time interval between consecutive pulses and the waveform of the PMT signal for a time interval of about 22 µs prior to and including the second pulse were written to hard disk for about 25 000 events. The waveform containing the first and the second pulse was digitized using the digital scope with a sampling period of 10 ns. The integrated charges and the amplitudes of the PMT pulses were obtained offline from the recorded waveforms for every event. The analysis was carried out using root [3]. The experimental setup used to collect the Cherenkov signal due to vertical muons is shown in Figure 1. The signal from vertical muons constitutes a convenient and straightforward reference point at prototype stage. Although it may be the basis of a good calibration and monitoring scheme by itself, its implementation on each of the 3200 WCDs of the auger Observatory is clearly prohibitive due to its associated cost increase. The dimensions of the two scintillation counters are 20x40x2.5 cm3 and the discrimination threshold of their PMTs was -30 mV. A 1” slab of steel was placed between the bottom of the tank and the lower scintillation counter in order to harden the energy spectrum of the triggering muons.

1.3. Results and discussion

Figure 2 shows the distribution of the time interval between the two consecutive pulses for raw data shown in plot a) and after we imposed the condition that the charge of the second pulse be greater that the charge of the first pulse, shown in plot b). This cut is simple and therefore easy to implement; it efficiently removes PMT after pulse events. The superimposed solid line in Fig. 2.b is a fit to the data showing good agreement with the expected exponential decay law for muon decay inside the tank. The measure mean decay time of 2.08 µs is lower that the muon lifetime in vacuum of 2.19 µs due to the inverse beta decay interaction of negative muon with the protons in the oxygen nuclei of the water molecules.


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Figure 2. Distribution of the time interval between the two consecutive pulses a) raw data and b) after we imposed the condition that the charge of the second pulse be greater that the charge of the first pulse. The solid line is an exponential fit to the data.

Figure 3 summarizes the results obtained for the integrated charges of the first and second pulses. The pair of upper-left plots show the charge distribution of the first pulse for data events (upper plot) that pass the muon-decay cuts (C2>C1 and time between pulses < 8 µs) and for a MC simulation of muons decaying inside our detector (lower plot). These cuts select stopping-muon events as clearly evidenced by the good fit of the data to the exponential curve in figure 2. The solid lines are gaussian fits. There is good agreement between measurements and simulation. Likewise, the pair of upper-right plots show the charge distribution of the second pulse for data events (upper plot) that pass the muon-decay cuts (C2>C1 and time between pulses < 8 µs) and for a MC simulation of muons decaying inside our detector (lower plot). By comparing the peak position of curve corresponding to the stopping muon (first pulse) with the peak position for the decay electron (second pulse), we conclude that the average Cherenkov signal produced by stopping muons is 0.55 times that produced by decay electrons or equivalently 0.095 VEM (Vertical Equivalent Muon). See [4-5] for additional details.


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[1]

Figure 3. a: Charge distribution for the first pulse obtained by requiring C2 > C1 and time difference between consecutive pulses < 8 µs. The upper plot corresponds to data and the lower to simulations. The solid line is a gaussian fit. b: Charge distribution for the second pulse obtained by requiring C2 > C1 and time difference between consecutive pulses < 8 µs. The upper plot corresponds to data and the lower to simulations. The solid line is a gaussian fit. c: Charge distribution for the first pulse obtained by requiring C2 < C1. The upper plot corresponds to data and the lower to simulations. The solid line is a gaussian fit. d: Time distribution for the time difference between the first and second pulses obtained by requiring C2 > C1. The solid line corresponds to an exponential curve with a decay constant of 2.09 µs.

By comparing the peak position for the charge distribution of the decay electron with the peak position for the charge distribution of muons crossing the WCD vertically we conclude that the average Cherenkov light radiated by the decay electron is 0.17 times the Cherenkov signal coming from muons crossing the WCD vertically. The charge distribution of vertically crossing muons was measured using the experimental setup shown in figure 1 with the same value for the tank PMT high voltage. The two plots on the lower-left side in figure 3 show the charge distribution of the first pulse for the events that satisfy the cut C2<C1, which selects crossing-muon events, the upper one is for data and the lower one for MC simulation. The flat region to the left of the peak can be interpreted as corner clipping muons, whereas the tail to the right of the peak corresponds to inclined muons that have path lengths in water greater than 1.2 m.


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The fact that the dimensions of the tank we used to obtain the present results are smaller than those of the full-size Auger Water Cherenkov detectors is of little relevance. The important parameter is the water level, which is the same; the larger dimensions of the Auger Water Cherenkov detectors simply require a straightforward extrapolation of the muon decay rate; this extrapolation is linear with the cross section of the tanks in first approximation. Finally, we would like to point out that the use of the cut V2>V1, instead of C2>C1, where Vi is the voltage amplitude of pulse i, produces essentially the same results, although it is slightly less efficient in removing PMT after pulses.

2. Separation of cosmic-ray components in a single water Cherenkov detector

2.1. Introduction The measurement of µ/EM, i.e., the muon contents relative to the electromagnetic component (electrons, positrons and photons), in extensive air showers is one of the requirements to perform a good measurement of the composition of primary cosmic rays by means of giant arrays of WCDs, such as the Pierre Auger Observatory [1]. Simulations show that extensive air showers (EAS) initiated by Fe nuclei have more muons at ground level than proton-initiated EASs for the same energy of the primary cosmic ray; in turn, gamma primaries produce even less muons. In the case of a hybrid cosmic-ray detector, such as the Pierre Auger Observatory, µ/EM and the EAS´s shower maximum are the main parameters for measuring composition of cosmic rays with energies around 1020 eV, the first is measured by the fluorescence telescopes and the second by the WCD array on the ground. In this section we describe the existence of very strong correlations among PMT charge deposition, rise-time and amplitude for isolated electrons, isolated muons and extensive air showers in a water Cherenkov detector; we show how these correlations lead to a clean separation of these components by using simple cuts in bi-dimensional parameter spaces. Identification of the traces of isolated electrons and muons allows one to form artificial traces for EAS by adding a pre-determined number of true electron and muon traces to make shower traces with known values of µ/EM. These artificial signatures for EAS can in turn be used to train a neural network with the aim to use it to measure the µ/EM value of true showers.

2.2. Experimental setup The water Cherenkov detectors (WCD) we used, see Figure 2, was located in Morelia at 2000 m. a.s.l. See subsection 2.1 for a more details on this setup. were A DAQ program written in LabView [2] and running on a PC fully acquired the PMT traces by using a digital oscilloscope (Tektronix, TDS220) connected to the PC on a GPIB port. The amplitudes of the PMT signals were obtained from the voltage trace, and the currents, i.e. voltage/(50 ohm), were integrated on-line to obtain precise measurements of the charges, rise times from 10%-50%, and rise times from 10%-90% for each event, as illustrated in Fig. 4.


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Figure 4. Trace of the PMT signal from the setup shown in Fig. 1. The upper plot corresponds to the direct voltage trace used to measure the amplitude and the lower one to its integral used to measure the charge and the rise times from 10%-50% and from 10%-90%.


Figure 5 shows the amplitude vs. rise time from 10% to 90% taken with the experimental setup of Figure 1 for muons arriving into the detector from all directions. We checked that the data for vertical muon taken precisely with the setup shown in Fig. 1 lie at the center of the region labeled as Muons in this figure.


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Figure 5. Amplitude vs. rise time from 10% to 90% for signals from a water Cherenkov detector taken with an inclusive trigger with an amplitude threshold of 30 mV. Simple cuts on this plot allow one to separate isolated electrons and isolated muons whose traces are subsequently used to form artificial shower signals which, in turn, are used to train neural networks to classify EAS according to their µ/EM ratio.

The events labeled as Electrons, with rise times around 10 ns, include mostly knock-on and muon-decay electrons produced in the concrete ceiling and walls of our laboratory inside of which the setup was located: we checked that this component is significantly reduced for an identical setup located outside the building. The events labeled as Muons, with rise times around 45 ns, include vertical, inclined and corner clipping muons. Elsewhere [6] we describe the use of the real electron and muon traces from single WCD to form artificial signals for extensive air showers with a known muon/EM ratio. These signals, as illustrated in Fig. 6 can in turn be used to estimate the muon contents of EAS by using neural networks [7], with the advantage of bypassing the process of a detailed simulation of the detector response to isolated electrons and muons. Figure 7 illustrates the idea by means of a visual comparison among one real PMT trace from a local shower with two “virtual” signals composed by mixing different mu/EM contents as explained in the figure caption. For additional details about these strong correlations among different properties of the signals see [8].


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Figure 6. Typical oscilloscope traces for a: A real isolated electron, with a typical charge of around 0.12 VEM and rise time 10-50% of around 5 ns; b: Real isolated muon with typical charge of around 1 VEM and rise time 10-50% of around 12 ns; and c: An extensive air shower with a charge of 8.2 VEM and a rise time 10-50% of 15 ns.


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Figure 7. a: Oscilloscope trace for a real extensive air shower with a charge of 7.8 VEM. b: Artificial trace composed by adding 8 muons whose arrival times are distributed exponentially with a time constant of 15 ns. c: Artificial trace composed by adding 4 muons with mean arrival time of 15 ns and 33 electrons with mean arrival time of 25 ns. d: Artificial trace composed by adding 66 electron traces with mean arrival time of 25 ns.

3. The Water Cherenkov Detector Array for Studies of Cosmic Rays at the University of Puebla

3.1. Introduction In this section we discuss some results obtained by operation over one year of the hybrid extensive air shower detector array at UAP (EAS-UAP). This array, consisting of 12 liquid scintillator detectors and 3 water Cherenkov detectors out of the planned 18 and 6 ones. Throughout the operation period we have made use of the hybrid scintillator-Cherenkov nature of our array to obtain complementary data to measure the arrival direction, energy and primary mass composition of cosmic rays. The EAS-UAP array (2200 m above sea level) is a valuable apparatus for the long term study of cosmic rays and at the same time an important training center for physics students interested in the field of cosmic rays. The EAS-UAP was designed to measure the lateral distribution of the EM and muonic components of secondary particles for EAS in the energy region of 1014-1016 eV. These measurements allow a determination of the arrival direction and energy of the primary cosmic ray for energies around the “knee” of the spectrum where the spectral index γ in the power law representation of the energy spectrum, dE/dx α E-γ, steepens from γ=2.7 to γ=3 at E = 3x1015 eV. One of the main experimental


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problems in cosmic ray physics is the measurement of the primary composition at energies around and above this structural feature, known as the "knee" [9], whose nature remains a puzzle despite the fact that it was discovered 48 years ago [10]. The main tool to study the composition of primary cosmic rays with ground detector arrays is by measuring the ratio of the muonic to the electromagnetic component of EAS; in fact, Monte Carlo simulations show that heavier primaries give rise to a bigger muon/EM ratio compared to lighter primaries of the same energy [11]. In fact, evidence for such variations has been reported recently [12]. It is therefore important to achieve a good determination of the ratio of the muonic to the electromagnetic components along with the muon energies involved for primary cosmic rays around the knee. For this reason, the EAS-UAP was designed as a hybrid array to get a handle on the measurement of mass composition of primary cosmic rays as discussed below.

3.2. Experimental setup

EAS-UAP (19oN, 90oW, 800 g/cm2) will consist of 6 water Cherenkov and 18 liquid scintillator detectors distributed on a square grid with spacing of 20m, as shown in Fig. 8.

Figure 8. EAS-UAP array located on the Campus of the University of Puebla. Stars represent Cherenkov detectors filled with 2230 l of water and the cylinders represent scintillation detectors filled with 130 l of liquid scintillator. Each of the 12 scintillator detectors consists of a cylindrical light-tight container of 1 m2 cross section made of polyethylene filled up to a height of 13 cm with liquid scintillator (Bicron BC-517H); each detector has one 5" photomultiplier (PMT, EMI model 9030A) located inside along the axis of the cylinder facing down with the photo-cathode placed 70 cm above the surface of the liquid scintillator. The three water Cherenkov detectors consist of cylindrical tanks made of polyethylene with an inner diameter of 1.54 m and a height of 1.30 m filled up to a height of 1.2 m with 2230 l of purified water. They have a single 8" PMT (Electron Tubes model 9353K) located at the top of the water level along the cylinder axis.


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Figure 9. Photograph of the present control room of the EAS-UAP detector array. All the inner surfaces of the three Cherenkov tanks were optically sealed and covered with a material called tyvec, which reflects light in a highly diffusive way in the relevant wavelength range of 300-500 nm. The trigger signal is formed by an “AND” coincidence (LeCroy 465) of the discriminated signals from the three water Cherenkov detectors. As discriminators we used LeCroy modules 623B and 821, set to a threshold of -30 mV. The data acquisition system consists of a set of 3 four-channel digital oscilloscopes (Tektronix model TDS 224 and 2014) that digitize the signals from 9 of the 12 PMTs of the 12 liquid scintillator detectors and the 3 PMTs from the 3 water Cherenkov detectors. The system is controlled by a PC running a custom-made acquisition program. Figure 9 shows a photograph of the present control room of the EAS-UAP detector array. We are in the process of replacing the hardware of the EAS-UAP DAQ system to the use of custom-made electronics boards based on fast ADC chips (200 MHz, dual AD9214 daughterboard shown in Fig. 10) and modern field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) [13].


3.3.1. Monitoring


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Monitoring and calibration of all the detectors is essential for the correct operation of the detector array which was designed to be operated remotely with minimal maintenance. Therefore, simple, reliable and cost-efficient monitoring and calibration methods are required. A method based on single-particle rates was used to monitor the stability in the first detectors arrays built around the world. Modern technology, however, allows the use of more detailed information on the detector response to single particles and EAS. In our case, we use a CAMAC scaler (CAEN 16 ch scaler model C257) to acquire the individual single-particle rates of each detector into the PC through the GPIB port (LeCroy model 8901A CAMAC-GPIB controller on the CAMAC crate and a National Figure 10. ADC daughterboard running at 200 MS/s. The two 10-bit ADC chips have a maximum

conversion rate 100 MS/s. Instruments GPIB card on the PC). Likewise, our DAQ system acquires all the PMT traces for each triggered event. An example of the front panel of this DAQ program is shown in Fig. 11 for 4 of the 12 liquid scintillator detectors and 4 water Cherenkov tanks. The acquired traces are used by the PC to perform on-line measurements of the integrated charges, arrival times, amplitudes and widths of all signals from the 17 PMTs, these data are saved into a hard-disk file for further off-line analysis.


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Figure 11. Oscilloscope traces for 6 of the 12 liquid scintillator detectors and 4 water Cherenkov tanks. The acquired traces are used to measure on-line the integrated charges, arrival times, amplitudes and widths of all signals from the detector PMTs.

3.3.2. Calibration As traditionally done, we use the natural flux of background muons and electrons to calibrate our detectors. For the location of the EAS-UAP, muons are the dominant contribution to the flux of secondary cosmic rays for energies above 100 MeV with about 300 muons per second per m2 and a mean energy of 2 GeV. These secondary muons originate in the atmosphere from hadronic interactions of low energy primary cosmic rays and provide a constant reference suitable to unfold other variations in our apparatus. In particular, we record, on a continuous basis, the energy depositions of single particles crossing the detectors in arbitrary directions by means of a special trigger called "calibration trigger" which requires single signals above threshold on individual detectors and operates simultaneously with the coincidence trigger so that we obtain the right calibration constants for each detector, i.e., the constants derived from the calibration events in the 10 minute period before the occurrence of each shower event. We use these calibration runs to obtain the spectra of energy depositions of single particles. A 2 GeV muon can cross the detector (dE/dx is around 2 MeV/cm) whereas a 10 MeV electron cannot; therefore muons produce more Cherenkov light than lower energy electrons (the range of 10 MeV electrons in a water-like liquid is about 5 cm). In the case of the water Cherenkov detectors the signals of muons crossing the detectors are proportional to their geometric path lengths. Our measurements indicate that 1 VEM is equal to approximately 0.92 times the position of the second peak in the charge distribution. In the case of the liquid scintillator detectors the second peak is dominated by electrons that fully deposit their energy and its position also corresponds closely to one equivalent particle. In consequence, we have a reliable way of converting the charge deposited in each detector into a number of equivalent particles (electrons for liquid scintillator and muons for water Cherenkov detectors), see Fig. 12.


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Figure 12. Spectrum of charge depositions scaled by the charge of Vertical Equivalent Muons (VEM). Upper plot: Calibration histogram for a water Cherenkov detector filled with purified water up to a height of 1.2 m; the shaded histogram corresponds to electrons selected by requiring Q/A < 0.5 and rise time from 10%-90% < 0.5. The first peak of the non-shaded histogram is dominated by corner-clipping muons, low-energy muons and electrons from muon decays; the second peak is dominated by muons crossing the whole depth of the the detector in all directions. Lower plot: Spectrum of PMT charge deposition for one of the liquid scintillator detectors filled with liquid scintillator up to a height of 13 cm.

3.3.3. Arrival direction The direction of the primary cosmic ray is inferred directly from the relative arrival times of the shower front at the different detectors. Figure 13 illustrates the way in which the arrival times at each detector depend on the arrival direction of the shower front. We have measured the zenithal distribution obtained with data from the first year of operation [14-15] with good agreement with the literature. The measured azimuthal distribution is in agreement with a flat distribution. We also verified that no artifact biases on the angular distribution are introduced by our trigger scheme by checking that the distributions for the time differences between the arrival time and the trigger coincidence time are centered around zero for each of the four detectors used in the trigger system.


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Figure 13. Illustration of the dependence of the arrival times of the particles in the shower front with the arrival direction. In the approximation of a flat shower front the formula sinθ sinφ = c(t2-t1)/d relates the arrival times, t1 and t2, of the shower front detected in two adjacent detectors separated by a distance d with the zenithal and azimuthal angles, θ and φ, respectively, of the direction perpendicular to the shower plane travelling at the speed of light c.

In order to estimate the angular resolution of the EAS-UAP detector array we assume as a good approximation that the front of the EAS is a flat disk perpendicular to the direction of the primary cosmic ray. Therefore, if the arrival times of the shower front detected in two adjacent detectors separated by a distance d are t1 and t2, then, the normal direction to the shower front is, in this approximation, given by the formula:

sinθ sinφ = c(t2-t1)/d where θ and φ are the zenithal and azimuthal angles of the vector normal to the shower plane traveling at the speed of light c. Figure 14 shows a screen print-out of the off-line event display of the EAS-UAP. It shows the arrival direction for an event as obtained independently with the water Cherenkov detectors (blue) and the liquid scintillator detectors (red). As shown in the figure, the agreement between the two sets of (θ,φ) angles is good.

3.3.4. Energy determination


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The core position, lateral distribution function and total number of shower electromagnetic particles Ne and muonic component , are reconstructed from a fit of the NKG expression given by

ρ(S,r)=K(S)(r/R0)S-2(1+r/R0)S-4.5 [16], where S is the shower age, r the distance of the detector to the shower core and R0 is the Moliere radius (90 m for an altitude of 2200 m a.s.l.). The shower energy is obtained by using the relation Ne(E0)=99.8 E0

1.15 , where E0 is the energy of the primary cosmic ray expressed in TeV [17]. Figure 15 illustrates the process of estimating the EAS energy by means of a fit of the data to a NKG function.

µN

Figure 14. Screen print-out of the off-line event display of the EAS-UAP. It shows the arrival direction for an event as obtained independently with the water Cherenkov detectors (blue) and the liquid scintillator detectors (red). As shown in the figure, the agreement between the two sets of (θ,φ) angles is good.


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Figure 15. Screen print-out of the off-line event display of the EAS-UAP. It shows the fit of the signals from the liquid scintillator detectors (red) to the NKG parameterization given above. In this particular event, the fit provides a value of N0 = 68031 which translates (using Ne(E0)=99.8 E0

1.15 as explained above) into an EAS energy of 196 TeV.

4. Conclusion We have described the use of muons stopping and decaying inside a water Cherenkov detector for calibration purposes. By using simple cuts on events triggered by consecutive pulses we have shown that the signal for muon decay emerges from the background, as shown in Fig. 2. We have done quantitative measurements of the average energies deposited in the detector by stopping muons, decay electrons and crossing muons, as shown in Fig. 3, in good agreement with MC simulations. We have used a single water Cherenkov detector to measure very accurately the charge, amplitude and rise times from 10%-90% of its signals passing a threshold-based inclusive trigger. We have shown that by plotting the amplitude vs. rise time, the events separate in a natural way into the following groups of signals associated to secondary cosmic rays: isolated electrons, isolated muons, and extensive air showers, as shown in Fig. 5. One application of this effect consists in the use of real muons and electron traces to form virtual EAS traces of known muon/EM ratio to train a neural network, or other classification scheme, in order to estimate the muon/EM ratio of real EAS. Finally, we have described the EAS-UAP hybrid detector array. A first analysis of the data collected allows us to conclude that the detector array shows good stability. We have implemented a method of calibrating the detectors to perform the conversion of the charge deposited in each detector to vertical equivalent muons and low-energy equivalent electrons. This array has the potential to allow one to determine the lateral distribution function for both the electromagnetic and the muonic components


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with the possibility to determine not only the energy and the arrival direction, but also the mass composition of the primary cosmic ray on a event by event basis for energies around 1015 eV. In the near future we will increase the number of water Cherenkov detectors to improve the muonic lateral distribution determination and the number of scintillator detectors to improve our aperture. We are also in the process of replacing the DAQ electronics of the EAS-UAP by custom-made electronics based on fast ADC and FPGA chips.

References

[1] 'The Pierre Auger Observatory '', http://wwwauger.org [2] LabView, see http://www.ni.com/labview/[3] root, see http://root.cern.ch/[4] M. Alarcon et al.Calibration and monitoring of water Cherenkov detectors with stopping and

crossing muons, Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A420:39-47, 1999 [5] X. Bertou et al., Calibration of the surface array of the pierre auger observatory, Nucl.

Instrum. Meth. A568:839-846, 2006 [6] Y. Jerónimo, H. Salazar, C. Vargas and L. Villaseñor, Separation of Cosmic-Ray

Components in a Single Water Cherenkov Detector, Proceedings of the X Mexican School of Particles and Fields, eds. U. Cotti, M. Mondragón, G. Tavares-Velasco, AIP Conf. Proceedings Volumen 670, pp. 479-486, 2003.

[7] H. Salazar and L. Villaseñor, Use of neural networks to classify cosmic-ray showers according to their muon/EM ratio, published in the proceedings of the V Latin American Symposium on High Energy Physics, Lima, Peru, July 12-17, 2004.

[8] H. Salazar, L. Villasenor, Separation of cosmic-ray components in a single water cherenkov detector, Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A553:295-298, 2005

[9] S.P. Swordy et al., Astroparticle Physics, Volume 18 (2002) 129-150. [10] G.V. Kulikov and G.V. Khristiansen, Sov. Phys. JETP, 41 (1959) 8. [11] B. Alessandro, et al., Proc.27th ICRC, 1 (2001) 124-127. [12] KASCADE Collaboration (Klages H. O. et al.), Nucl. Phys. B (Proc. Suppl.), 52 (1997)

92 [13] G. Perez et al., Electronics and data acquisition system of the extensive air shower detector

array at the University of Puebla, to appear in the proceedings of the 30th International Cosmic Ray Conference, July 3-11, 2007, Merida, Mexico

[14] H. Salazar, O. Martínez, E. Moreno, J. Cotzomi, L. Villaseñor, O. Saavedra, Nuclear Physics B (Proc. Suppl.) 122 (2003) 251-254.

[15] J. Cotsomi, O. Martinez, E. Moreno, H. Salazar and L. Villaseñor, Extensive Air Shower Array at the University of Puebla for the Study of Cosmic Rays, Rev. Mex. Fis. Vol. 51 No. 1 (2005) 38-46

[16] J. Nishimura, Handbuch der Physik XLVI/2, (1967) 1 [17] M. Aglietta et al., Phys. Lett. B, 337 (1994) 376-382


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http://www.ni.com/labview/

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