INVESTIGADORES
MOLLERACH Maria Silvia
artículos
Título:
On the disintegration of cosmic ray nuclei by solar photons
Autor/es:
EPELE, LUIS N.; MOLLERACH, SILVIA; ROULET, ESTEBAN
Revista:
JOURNAL OF HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS
Editorial:
SPRINGER
Referencias:
Año: 1999 vol. 03 p. 1 - 15
ISSN:
1126-6708
Resumen:
We discuss in detail the possibility of observing pairs of simultaneous
parallel air showers produced by the fragments of cosmic ray nuclei
which disintegrated in collisions with solar photons. We consider
scenarios with different cosmic ray compositions, exploring the
predicted rates for existing and planned detectors and looking for
methods to extract information on the initial composition from the
characteristics of the signal. In particular, we find that fluorescence
detectors, such as HiRes or the Telescope Array, due to their low
threshold ( ~ 1017 eV) and large area ( ~ 104
km2) may observe several events per year if cosmic rays at
those energies are indeed heavy nuclei. The possibility of exploiting
the angular orientation of the plane containing the two showers to
further constrain the cosmic ray composition is also discussed.