English

Recent Results from the Kascade Air Shower Experiment

Astrophysics 2009-02-19 v1

Abstract

The extensive air shower (EAS) experiment KASCADE has started data taking at the laboratory site of the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe. The major goal is to determine the elemental composition of the primary cosmic ray particles in the energy range around and above the knee at Ek51015E_{\rm k} \approx 5 \cdot 10^{15} eV. Here, we shall discuss some results on tests of hadronic interaction models required for air shower simulations, present the `knee' in particle size distributions of electrons, muons, and hadrons, and finally discuss preliminary results on the elemental composition which are based on event-by-event measurements of the muon/electron ratio. The great advantage over previous analyses which were based purely on {\em average} numbers of samples of events is emphasized. The KASCADE data, analyzed in variety of different approaches, favor an increasingly heavier composition above the knee.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9902113,
  title  = {Recent Results from the Kascade Air Shower Experiment},
  author = {K. -H. Kampert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9902113},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

8 pages, 4 figures; Talk given at the Second Meeting on New Worlds in Astroparticle Physics, University of the Algarve, Faro, Portugal, September 1998

R2 v1 2026-07-22T09:46:11.105Z