ICRC2015

YAC sensitivity for measuring the light-component spectrum of primary cosmic rays at the ``knee" energies

4 Aug 2015, 16:00

1h

Amazon Foyer (World Forum)

Board: 214

Poster contribution CR-EX Poster 3 CR

Speakers

Prof. Ding Chen (National Astronomical Observatories, CAS)Prof. Jing Huang (Institute of High Energy Physics, CAS)Dr L.M. Zhai (Institute of High Energy Physics, CAS)Prof. M. Shibata (Yokohama National University, Yokohama 240-8501, Japan)Dr Y. Katayose (Faculty of Engineering, Yokohama National University, Yokohama 240-8501, Japan)

Description

A new air-shower core-detector array (YAC: Yangbajing Air-shower Core-detector array) has been developed to measure the primary cosmic-ray composition at the ``knee" energies in Tibet, China, focusing mainly on the light components. The prototype experiment (YAC-I) consisting of 16 detectors has been constructed and operated at Yangbajing (4300 m a.s.l.) in Tibet since May 2009. YAC-I has been placed near the center of the Tibet-III AS array operating together. In this paper, we have performed a Monte Carlo simulation to check the sensitivity of YAC-I+Tibet-III array to the light-component (protons and helium nuclei) in the primary cosmic rays around the knee energies, taking account of the observation conditions of actual YAC-I+Tibet-III array. We have checked the sensitivity of YAC array to the interaction models (SIBYLL2.1, EPOS-LHC (v3400) and QGSJETII-04) and primary cosmic-ray composition models (``He-poor", ``He-rich" and ``Gaisser-fit") around the knee using the high-energy core events observed by the YAC-I+Tibet-III array. The simulation shows that the light-component spectrum estimated by our methods can well reproduce the input ones within 10% error, and there will be about 30% systematic errors mostly induced by the primary and interaction models used.