4 research outputs found
A Likelihood Method for Measuring the Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Ray Composition
Air fluorescence detectors traditionally determine the dominant chemical
composit ion of the ultrahigh energy cosmic ray flux by comparing the averaged
slant depth of the shower maximum, , as a function of energy to the
slant depths expect ed for various hypothesized primaries. In this paper, we
present a method to make a direct measurement of the expected mean number of
protons and iron by comparing the shap es of the expected
distributions to the distribution for data. The advantages of this method
includes the use of information of the full distribution and its ability to
calculate a flux for various cosmic ray compositi ons. The same method can be
expanded to marginalize uncertainties due to choice of spectra, hadronic models
and atmospheric parameters. We demonstrate the technique with independent
simulated data samples from a parent sample of protons and iron. We accurately
predict the number of protons and iron in the parent sample and show that the
uncertainties are meaningful.Comment: 11 figures, 22 pages, accepted by Astroparticle Physic
Alternative Methods to Finding Patterns in HiRes Stereo Data
In this paper Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays UHECRs data observed by the HiRes
fluorescence detector in stereo mode is analyzed to search for events in the
sky with an arrival direction lying on a great circle. Such structure is known
as the arc structure. The arc structure is expected when the charged cosmic
rays pass through the galactic magnetic field. The arcs searched for could
represent a broad or a small scale anisotropy depending on the proposed source
model for the UHECRs. The Arcs in this paper are looked for using Hough
transform were Hough transform is a technique used to looking for patterns in
images. No statistically significant arcs were found in this study