Calorimeters for Measuring Natural Phenomena

• Main Author: Wigmans, Richard
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University PressOxford 2017
• Subjects: Hess; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198786351.003.0010; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/45079260/oso-9780198786351-chapter-10.pdf

Abstract Since the first edition of this book appeared (2000), there has been a spectacular development in the use of calorimeters for measuring natural phenomena, such as the detection of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, or neutrinos from sources such as the Sun, the Earth’s atmosphere, or the Universe at large. This development is documentsed in this chapter. It starts with a section on SuperKamiokande, which has already collected two Nobel prizes, and its envisaged successor HyperKamiokande, which is designed to be sensitive to neutrinos from supernova explosions in the Andromeda galaxy. On an even larger scale, several sections of the Mediterranean sea as well a cubic kilometre of ice under the South Pole are looking for neutrinos from outer space, and are detecting other interesting phenomena as well. The Earth’s atmosphere is used as a huge calorimeter by experiments such as Auger and KASKADE-Grande. Combined with dedicated Cherenkov telescopes, such as HESS, these experiments have provided important new insights in mysterious aspects of the high-energy component of the cosmic rays that bombard our planet, such as the knees in the PeV-EeV region and the GZK cutoff.