Study on multi-ELVES in the Pierre Auger Observatory

Since 2013, the four sites of the Fluorescence Detector (FD) of the Pierre Auger Observatory record ELVES with a dedicated trigger. These UV light emissions are correlated to distant lightning strikes. The length of recorded traces has been increased from 100 μs (2013), to 300 μs (2014-16), to 900 μs (2017-present), to progressively extend the observation of the light emission towards the vertical of the causative lightning and beyond. A large fraction of the observed events shows double ELVES within the time window, and, in some cases, even more complex structures are observed. The nature of the multi-ELVES is not completely understood but may be related to the different types of lightning in which they are originated. For example, it is known that Narrow Bipolar Events can produce double ELVES, and Energetic In-cloud Pulses, occurring between the main negative and upper positive charge layer of clouds, can induce double and even quadruple ELVES in the ionosphere. This report shows the seasonal and daily dependence of the time gap, amplitude ratio, and correlation between the pulse widths of the peaks in a sample of 1000+ multi-ELVES events recorded during the period 2014-20. The events have been compared with data from other satellite and ground-based sensing devices to study the correlation of their properties with lightning observables such as altitude and polarity

Update of the Offline Framework for AugerPrime

Work on the Offline Framework for the Pierre Auger Observatory was started in 2003 to create a universal framework for event reconstruction and simulation. The development and installation of the AugerPrime upgrade of the Pierre Auger Observatory require an update of the Offline Framework to handle the additional detector components and the upgraded Surface Detector Electronics. The design of the Offline Framework proved to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate the changes needed to be able to handle the AugerPrime detector. This flexibility has been a goal since the development of the code started. The framework separates data structures from processing modules. The detector components map directly onto data structures. It was straightforward to update or add processing modules to handle the additional information from the new detectors. We will discuss the general structure of the Offline Framework, explaining the design decisions that provided its flexibility and point out the few of the features of the original design that required deeper changes, which could have been avoided in hindsight. Given the disruptive nature of the AugerPrime upgrade, the developers decided that the update for AugerPrime was the moment to change also the language standard for the implementation and move to the latest version of C++, to break strict backward compatibility eliminating deprecated interfaces, and to modernize the development infrastructure. We will discuss the changes that were made to the structure in general and the modules that were added to the framework to handle the new detector components

Aerosol Optical Depth from MODIS satellite data above the Pierre Auger Observatory

Aerosol optical depth can be retrieved from measurements performed by Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite instrument. The MODIS satellite system includes two polar satellites, Terra and Aqua. Each of them flies over the Pierre Auger Observatory once a day, providing two measurements of aerosols per day and covering the whole area of the Observatory. MODIS aerosol data products have been generated by three dedicated algorithms over bright and dark land and over ocean surface. We choose the Deep Blue algorithm data to investigate the distribution of aerosols over the Observatory, as this algorithm is the most appropriate one for semi-arid land of the Pierre Auger Observatory. This data algorithm allows us to obtain aerosol optical depth values for the investigated region, and to build cloud-free aerosol maps with a horizontal resolution 0.1 degrees x0.1 degrees. Since a sufficient number of measurements was obtained only for Loma Amarilla and Coihueco fluorescence detector (FD) sites of the Pierre Auger Observatory, a more detailed analysis of aerosol distributions is provided for these sites. Aerosols over these FD sites are generally distributed in a similar way each year, but some anomalies are also observed. These anomalies in aerosol distributions appear mainly due to some transient events, such as volcanic ash clouds, fires etc. We conclude that the Deep Blue MODIS algorithm provides more realistic aerosol optical depth values than other available algorithms

Monte Carlo simulations for the Pierre Auger Observatory using the VO auger grid resources

The Pierre Auger Observatory, located near Malargüe, Argentina, is the world’s largest cosmic-ray detector. It comprises a 3000 km2 surface detector and 27 fluorescence telescopes, which measure the lateral and longitudinal distributions of the many millions of air-shower particles produced in the interactions initiated by a cosmic ray in the Earth’s atmosphere. The determination of the nature of cosmic rays and studies of the detector performances rely on extensive Monte Carlo simulations describing the physics processes occurring in extensive air showers and the detector responses. The aim of the Monte Carlo simulations task is to produce and provide the Auger Collaboration with reference libraries used in a wide variety of analyses. All multipurpose detector simulations are currently produced in local clusters using Slurm and HTCondor. The bulk of the shower simulations are produced on the grid, via the Virtual Organization auger, using the DIRAC middleware. The job submission is made via python scripts using the DIRAC-API. The Auger site is undergoing a major upgrade, which includes the installation of new types of detectors, demanding increased simulation resources. The novel detection of the radio component of extensive air showers is the most challenging endeavor, requiring dedicated shower simulations with very long computation times, not optimized for the grid production. For data redundancy, the simulations are stored on the Lyon server and the grid Disk Pool Manager and are accessible to the Auger members via iRODS and DIRAC, respectively. The CERN VM-File System is used for software distribution where, soon, the Auger Offline software will also be made available

The ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray sky above 32 EeV viewed from the Pierre Auger Observatory

The region of the toe in the cosmic-ray spectrum, located at about 45 EeV by the Pierre Auger Collaboration, is of primary interest in the search for the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). The suppression of the flux with increasing energy can be explained by the interaction of UHECRs with intergalactic photons, resulting in a shrinking of the observable universe, and/or by cut-offs in acceleration potential at the astrophysical sources, yielding a high-rigidity sample of single (or few) UHECR species around the toe. The predominance of foreground sources combined with reduced deflections could thus offer a path towards localizing ultra-high energy accelerators, through the study of UHECR arrival directions. In this contribution, we present the results of blind and astrophysically-motivated searches for anisotropies with data collected above 32 EeV during the first phase of the Pierre Auger Observatory, i.e. prior to the AugerPrime upgrade, for an exposure of over 120,000 km2 yr sr. We have conducted model-independent searches for overdensities at small and intermediate angular scales, correlation studies with several astrophysical structures, and cross-correlation analyses with catalogs of candidate extragalactic sources. These analyses provide the most important evidence to date for anisotropy in UHECR arrival directions around the toe as measured from a single observatory

A tau scenario application to a search for upward-going showers with the Fluorescence Detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory

Recent observations of two coherent radio pulses with the ANITA detector can be interpreted as steeply upward-going cosmic-ray showers with energies of a few tenths of an EeV and remain unexplained. The Pierre Auger Observatory has a large exposure to such upward propagating shower-like events, and has used 14 years of its Fluorescence Detector (FD) data to perform a generic search for such events with elevation angles greater than 20◦ from the horizon. Here this search is recast to constrain models generating high energy τ-leptons. For maximal flexibility, only the propagation, decay, and interactions of τ-leptons are treated in this analysis, meaning that the results are independent of the τ-production scenario. This treatment allows for the application of these results to the wide range of models producing τ-leptons that have been proposed to describe the "anomalous" ANITA events. The goal of this study is accomplished by generating τ-leptons within the Earth and its atmosphere with an intensity dependent on the media density. The zenith angle, location and calorimetric energy of any resulting τ-induced air showers are then used to calculate the exposure of the FD of the Pierre Auger Observatory to τ primaries. Differential limits as low as 10−9 GeV s−1cm−2sr−1 to the flux of τ-leptons produced with less than a 50 km path length below the Earth’s surface are reported for several zenith angle ranges and primary energy spectra. Full exposure and sensitivity information is provided, facilitating the application of these results to different τ-lepton production models

Reconstruction of Events Recorded with the Water-Cherenkov and Scintillator Surface Detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory

With the knowledge and statistical power of over a decade and a half of measurements, the Auger Collaboration has developed, assessed, and refined robust methods for reconstructing the energies and arrival directions of the highest-energy cosmic rays from the signal and timing measurements of its surface detector array. Concurrently, the unearthing of an increasingly complex astrophysical scenario and tensions with hadronic interaction models have demanded the addition of primary mass as an observable measurable using the surface detector. Access to information on the mass hinges on the disentanglement of the electromagnetic and muonic components of extensive air showers. Consequently, an upgrade to the Observatory, AugerPrime, is being carried out by equipping existing water-Cherenkov stations with a 3.8 m2 Scintillator Surface Detector (SSD). The SSDs, with their high sensitivity to electrons and positrons, will provide samples of the lateral distribution of particles at the ground that complement those of the water-Cherenkov detectors, which are significantly more sensitive to muons. When used together, the two measurements enable extraction of the number of incident muons, which is a quantity that strongly correlates with primary mass. We describe the reconstruction methods being developed for application to measurements of the surface detector of the Observatory with a particular focus on the enhancement of these methods with data of the SSDs of AugerPrime. Results from the reconstruction of thousands of high-energy events already measured with deployed SSDs are also shown

Constraining Lorentz Invariance Violation using the muon content of extensive air showers measured at the Pierre Auger Observatory

Lorentz Invariance (LI) implies that the space-time structure is the same for all observers. On the other hand, various quantum gravity theories suggest that it may be violated when approaching the Planck scale. At extreme energies, like those available in the collision of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs) with atmosphere nuclei, one should also expect a change in the interactions due to Lorentz Invariance Violation (LIV). In this work, the effects of LIV on the development of Extensive Air Showers (EAS) have been considered. After having introduced LIV as a perturbation term in the single-particle dispersion relation, a library of simulated showers with different energies, primary particles and LIV strengths has been produced. Possible LIV has been studied using the muon content of air showers measured at the Pierre Auger Observatory. Limits on LIV parameters have been derived from a comparison between the Monte Carlo expectations and muon fluctuation measurements from the Pierre Auger Observatory