30 research outputs found

    Are Antiprotons Forever?

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    Up to one million antiprotons from a single LEAR spill have been captured in a large Penning trap. Surprisingly, when the antiprotons are cooled to energies significantly below 1 eV, the annihilation rate falls below background. Thus, very long storage times for antiprotons have been demonstrated in the trap, even at the compromised vacuum conditions imposed by the experimental set up. The significance for future ultra-low energy experiments, including portable antiproton traps, is discussed.Comment: 12 pages, latex; 4 figures, uufiled. Slightly expanded discussion of expected energy dependence of annihilation cross section and rate, and of estimates of trap pressure, plus minor text improvement

    A Catching Trap for All Antiproton Seasons

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    We describe the origin, development, and status of the Los Alamos antiproton catching trap. Originally designed for the antiproton gravity experiment, it now is clear that this device can be a source of low-energy antiprotons for a wide range of physics, both on site, at CERN, and also off site.Comment: 18 pages, LaTeX, 6 figures available upon request, In honor of Herbert Walthe

    A Measurement of Time-Averaged Aerosol Optical Depth using Air-Showers Observed in Stereo by HiRes

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    Air fluorescence measurements of cosmic ray energy must be corrected for attenuation of the atmosphere. In this paper we show that the air-showers themselves can yield a measurement of the aerosol attenuation in terms of optical depth, time-averaged over extended periods. Although the technique lacks statistical power to make the critical hourly measurements that only specialized active instruments can achieve, we note the technique does not depend on absolute calibration of the detector hardware, and requires no additional equipment beyond the fluorescence detectors that observe the air showers. This paper describes the technique, and presents results based on analysis of 1258 air-showers observed in stereo by the High Resolution Fly's Eye over a four year span.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication by Astroparticle Physics Journa

    Search for Global Dipole Enhancements in the HiRes-I Monocular Data above 10^{18.5} eV

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    Several proposed source models for Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs) consist of dipole distributions oriented towards major astrophysical landmarks such as the galactic center, M87, or Centaurus A. We use a comparison between real data and simulated data to show that the HiRes-I monocular data for energies above 10^{18.5} eV is, in fact, consistent with an isotropic source model. We then explore methods to quantify our sensitivity to dipole source models oriented towards the Galactic Center, M87, and Centaurus A.Comment: 17 pages, 31 figure

    Observation of the Ankle and Evidence for a High-Energy Break in the Cosmic Ray Spectrum

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    We have measured the cosmic ray spectrum at energies above 101710^{17} eV using the two air fluorescence detectors of the High Resolution Fly's Eye experiment operating in monocular mode. We describe the detector, PMT and atmospheric calibrations, and the analysis techniques for the two detectors. We fit the spectrum to models describing galactic and extragalactic sources. Our measured spectrum gives an observation of a feature known as the ``ankle'' near 3Ă—10183\times 10^{18} eV, and strong evidence for a suppression near 6Ă—10196\times 10^{19} eV.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures. To appear in Physics Letters B. Accepted versio

    Producing Slow Antihydrogen for a Test of CPT Symmetry with ATHENA

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    The ATHENA experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator facility at CERN aims at testing CPT symmetry with antihydrogen. An overview of the experiment, together with preliminary results of development towards the production of slow antihydrogen are reported.The ATHENA experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator facility at CERN aims at testing CPT symmetry with antihydrogen. An overview of the experiment, together with preliminary results of development towards the production of slow antihydrogen are reported.The ATHENA experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator facility at CERN aims at testing CPT symmetry with antihydrogen. An overview of the experiment, together with preliminary results of development towards the production of slow antihydrogen are reported.The ATHENA experiment at the Antiproton Decelerator facility at CERN aims at testing CPT symmetry with antihydrogen. An overview of the experiment, together with preliminary results of development towards the production of slow antihydrogen are reported

    A Likelihood Method for Measuring the Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Ray Composition

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    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, XmaxX_{max}, 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 XmaxX_{max} 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

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    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
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