Hamburg 2016 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 40: Kosmische Strahlung II

T 40.6: Talk

Monday, February 29, 2016, 18:05–18:20, VMP9 SR 29

Search for ultra-high energy photons with AMIGA muon counters — •Nicolas Martin Gonzalez for the Pierre-Auger collaboration — Instituto de Tecnologias en Deteccion y Astroparticulas, Buenos Aires, Argentina. — Institut für Kernphysik, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie.

The study of the composition of ultra-high energy (UHE) cosmic rays (CR) is one of the topical problems of astroparticle physics. The discovery of UHE photons, i.e. photons with energies around 1 EeV, in primary cosmic rays could be of particular interest for the field of astroparticle physics, and also for fundamental physics, since they are tracers of the highest-energy processes in the Universe. For the search for UHE photons at the Pierre Auger Observatory (PAO), several parameters have been proposed to distinguish between primary hadrons and photons. One of the most promising approaches to search for primary gamma rays is the study of the muon component in extensive air showers (EAS) produced in the interaction between the CR and the nuclei in the atmosphere. The number of muons in showers induced by gamma primaries is an order of magnitude lower than the hadronic primaries counterpart. The AMIGA extension of the PAO, consisting of an array of buried scintillators counters, allows the study of the muons produced during the EAS development. In this talk, the sensitivity of the muon counters to photon-initiated EAS and the possible discrimination procedures will be discussed using dedicated EAS simulations with software package CORSIKA, including the detector response using the Offline package developed by the Pierre Auger Collaboration.