Status of the AugerPrime upgrade of the Pierre Auger Observatory

NIRAJ DHITAL FOR THE PIERRE AUGER COLLABORATION, B. WUNDHEILER

Conferencia; 7th Roma International Conference on Astroparticle Physics; 2018

t.The Pierre Auger Observatory has been very successful in determining many aspects of the highest-energy cosmic rays including, among others, the flux suppression at energies above 4x10^19eV, stringent upper limits on photon and neutrino fluxes at ultra-high energies and an unexpected evolution of the mass composition with energy.We expect an extension of the frontiers of our knowledge on these aspects from a major upgrade of the Observatory. The upgrade, known as AugerPrime, will include an addition of a 4 m2 Surface Scintillator Detector atop each water-Cherenkov station of the Surface array. The new detectors will provide us with an unprecedented opportunity to perform a complementary measurement of the shower particles and thus determine the primary mass composition with good accuracy on an event-by-event basis. AugerPrime will also include an upgrade of electronics, installation of the AMIGA Underground Muon Detector and a change of observation mode of the Fluorescence Detector, which will increase its current duty cycle by about 50%. Current status of the upgrade with the main focus on the Surface Scintillator Detectors will be presented, following a brief description of the physics motivation for the upgrade.