Simulation Studies on Arrival Time Distributions of Cherenkov Photons in Extensive Air Showers

Abstract

Atmospheric Cherenkov technique is an established methodology to study TeV energy gamma rays. Here we carry out systematic monte carlo simulation studies of the timing information of Cherenkov photons. Extensive studies have already been carried out in this regard. Most of these are carried out at higher energies with the aim of studying the elemental composition of cosmic rays. However not much attention is paid to the species dependent signatures at TeV energies. In this work, functional fits have been carried out to the spherical Cherenkov shower fronts and the radii of curvature have been found to be equal to the height of shower maximum irrespective of the species or the observation level. Functional fits have also been carried out to describe the pulse shapes at various core distances in terms of well known probability density distribution functions (PDF). Two types of PDF's have been tried viz. gamma function and lognormal function. The variation of the pulse shape parameters as a function of primary energy, observation height and incident angles have been studied. The possibility of deriving the pulse shape parameters like the rise & decay times, full width at half maximum from the easily measurable quantities like the mean and RMS variation of photon arrival times offers a very important new technique which can be easily applied in an observation.Comment: 34 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physic