Related papers: A new method for the UHECR mass composition studie…
Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECR), of energy >10 EeV, arrive at the Earth regularly, but their sources, acceleration mechanisms, details of propagation through the universe, and particle composition remain mysteries. In addition, their…
The current methods to determine the primary energy of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) are different when dealing with hadron or photon primaries. The current experiments combine two different techniques, an array of surface…
The Pierre Auger Observatory infers the chemical composition of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays through two independent detection techniques. The Fluorescence Detector (FD) measures the longitudinal profile of high energy air showers and can…
The most important goal of studying an extensive air shower is to find the energy, mass and arrival direction of its primary cosmic ray. In order to find these parameters, the core position and arrival direction of the shower should be…
Very high energy cosmic rays are typically studied by measuring extensive air showers formed by secondary particles produced in collisions with air nuclei. The indirect character of the measurement makes the physics interpretation of cosmic…
The properties of cosmic rays with energies above 1PeV have to be deduced from the spacetime structure and particle content of the air showers which they initiate. In this review, a summary of the phenomenology of these giant air showers is…
While the fluorescence and the ground counter techniques for the detection of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) were being developed for decades, the interest in the radio detection diminished after the initial experiments in the 1960s.…
The paper present correlation of radio signal with air shower parameters: shower energy E0 and depth of maximum Xmax. It is shown that from radio emission measurements of air showers one can obtain individual showers parameters and mass…
Calibrating the absolute energy scale of air showers initiated by ultra-high energy cosmic rays is an important experimental issue. Currently, the corresponding systematic uncertainty amounts to 14-21% using the fluorescence technique. Here…
The origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) is one of the intriguing mysteries in astroparticle physics. In order to identify their sources, we need precise knowledge of the mass composition of UHECRs. The direct detection of…
One of the methods for studying the highest energy cosmic rays is to measure the fluorescence light emitted by the extensive air showers induced by them. To reconstruct a shower cascade curve from measurements of the number of photons…
We argue that the increase of the ratio baryon/meson due to the presence of strong colour fields and percolation in ultra-high energy hadronic collisions, helps to explain some of the global features of ultra-high energy cosmic ray cascades…
The combination of fluorescence and surface detectors at the Pierre Auger Observatory offers unprecedented precision in testing models of hadronic interactions at center-of-mass energies around 70 TeV and beyond. However, for some time,…
In this paper we study the depth at which a cosmic ray shower reaches its maximum (\Xmax) as predicted by Monte Carlo simulation. The use of \Xmax in the determination of the primary particle mass can only be done by comparing the measured…
We show, for the first time, radio measurements of the depth of shower maximum ($X_\text{max}$) of air showers induced by cosmic rays that are compared to measurements of the established fluorescence method at the same location. Using…
A re-examination of the atmospheric cascade profile of the highest energy cosmic ray is presented. The study includes air-shower simulations considering different cross sections, particle multiplicity and variation of the…
Extensive air showers still are our only access to the highest-energy particles in the universe, namely cosmic-ray nuclei with energies up to several 100 EeV. Studying open questions in cosmic-ray physics, like their yet unknown origin…
Measuring the angles of muons and electrons in air showers is proposed as a method for studying the primary cosmic-ray mass composition near the knee of the cosmic-ray energy spectrum at a few $10^{15}$ eV. Conventional tracking detectors…
We report on studies of the composition of ultra high energy cosmic rays with the Pierre Auger Observatory. The detection of longitudinal air shower profiles with the fluorescence detector is described and the measurement of the average…
To interpret the mean depth of cosmic ray air shower maximum and its dispersion, we parametrize those two observables as functions of the first two moments of the $\ln A$ distribution. We examine the goodness of this simple method through…