Cosmic Ray Composition from the 40-string IceCube/IceTop Detectors

• Main Authors: IceCube Collaboration, Andeen, Karen, Rawlins, K., Feusels, T.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: e-Publications@Marquette 2011
• Subjects: Physics; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://epublications.marquette.edu/physics_fac/178; https://epublications.marquette.edu/context/physics_fac/article/1178/viewcontent/Andeen_12253pubd.pdf

The IceCube Observatory at the South Pole is composed of a deep detector and a surface detector, IceTop, both of which use Cherenkov light to detect charged particles. Cosmic ray air showers contain multiple particle components: in particular, electrons and muons detectable at the surface by IceTop, and high-energy muons detectable by the deep IceCube detector, in relative amounts that depend on the primary cosmic ray mass. Thus, coincident events can be used to measure both the energy and the mass composition. Here, a neural network is trained with simulations to map observables from the two detectors (input) into energy and mass estimators (output). Experimental data is then run through the same network, to measure the energy spectrum and average logarithmic mass of cosmic rays in the energy range of about 1-30 PeV.