Sensitivity of YAC to measure the light-component spectrum of primary cosmic rays at the 'knee' energies. (16th February 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Zhai, L M; Huang, J; Chen, D; Shibata, M; Katayose, Y; Zhang, Ying; Liu, J S; Chen, Xu; Hu, X B; Lin, Y H
• Is Part Of: Journal of physics. Volume 42:Number 4(2015:Apr.)
• Publication Date: 2015-02-16
• Subjects: cosmic rays -- hadronic interaction -- knee -- composition -- energy spectrum; 98.70.Sa -- 96.50.sb -- 96.50.sd; Nuclear physics -- Periodicals; Particles (Nuclear physics) -- Periodicals; Physique nucléaire -- Périodiques; Particules (Physique nucléaire) -- Périodiques; Kernfysica; Elementaire deeltjes; 539.7
• DOI: 10.1088/0954-3899/42/4/045201
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0954-3899

Abstract

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 the 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 the actual YAC-I+Tibet-III array. The selection of light component from others was made by use of an artificial neural network. 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.