Sensitivity of YAC to measure the light-component spectrum of primary cosmic rays at the 'knee' energies

Autor: Zhai, L M, Huang, J, Chen, D, Shibata, M, Katayose, Y, Zhang, Ying, Liu, J S, Chen, Xu, Hu, X B, Lin, Y H
Rok vydání: 2016
Předmět:
Druh dokumentu: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1088/0954-3899/42/4/045201
Popis: A new air-shower core-detector array (YAC : Yangbajing Air-shower Core-detector array) has been developed to measure the primary cosmic-ray composition at the "knee" energies in Tibet, China, focusing mainly on the light components. The prototype experiment (YAC-I) consisting of 16 detectors has been constructed and operated at Yangbajing (4300 m a.s.l.) in Tibet since May 2009. YAC-I is installed in the Tibet-III AS array and operates together. In this paper, we performed a Monte Carlo simulation to check the sensitivity of YAC-I+Tibet-III array to the cosmic-ray light component of cosmic rays around the knee energies, taking account of the observation conditions of actual YAC-I+Tibet-III array. The selection of light component from others was made by use of an artificial neural network (ANN). The simulation shows that the light-component spectrum estimated by our methods can well reproduce the input ones within 10\% error, and there will be about 30\% systematic errors mostly induced by the primary and interaction models used. It is found that the full-scale YAC and the Tibet-III array is powerful to study the cosmic-ray composition, in particular, to obtain the energy spectra of protons and helium nuclei around the knee energies.
Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure
Databáze: arXiv