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arXiv · 1602.08830

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

L M Zhai·J Huang·D Chen·M Shibata·Y Katayose·Ying Zhang·J S Liu·Xu Chen·X B Hu·Y H Lin
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Abstract

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.

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L M Zhai, J Huang, D Chen, M Shibata, Y Katayose, Ying Zhang, J S Liu, Xu Chen, X B Hu, Y H Lin. 2016-02-29. Sensitivity of YAC to measure the light-component spectrum of primary cosmic rays at the "knee" energies. https://doi.org/10.1088/0954-3899%2F42%2F4%2F045201

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