Cosmic rays using water Cherenkov detectors in Antarctic: First Campaign toward the Antarctic node of the LAGO Collaboration

A.M GULISANO; S. DASSO; O. ARESO; M. PEREIRA

Ostend

Congreso; 14 European Space Weather Week; 2017

Ground observations of galactic Cosmic Rays (CRs) are systematically done from several decades using Neutron Monitors(NMs)at different locations. These observations allowed to quantify several effects of the interplanetary magnetic conditions on the transport of CRs in the heliosphere,both on large time scales (e.g.,the solar cycle)as well as on shorter time scales (e.g. Forbush decreases). From NMs located at high latitudes it is also possible to observe solar cosmic rays(e.g.,Ground Level Enhancements,GLEs). Beyond that observations using NMs are veryuseful to quantify CRs fluxes and have an indisputable importance in the present to determine the conditions of SpaceWeather, they are proportional counters of neutrons that cannot discriminate energy bands for the observed particles. Water Cherenkov detectors (WCDs) have shown to be able to reproduce time structures observed with NMs (e.g., observations from surface detectors of the Pierre Auger collaboration).The major advantage of WCDs compared with NMs is that the formerone scan discriminate energy channels for the observed secondary charged particles (as for instance muons,electrons,gammarays producing creations of electron-positron pairs). From numerical simulations,this energy discrimination can be used for a better understanding of the flux of primary CRs arriving to the terrestrial environment. In this work, we present the project LAGO-Antarctic node (LAGO: Latin American GiantObservatory). The LAGO project is a collaborative network formed by eleven countries(Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala,Mexico, Peru, Spain, andVenezuela).Many of these countries have LAGO-WCDs working in an operative way. The network of WCDs has nodes at sites with different rigidity cut-offs and different altitudes. One of the aims of LAGO is to study the flux of the secondary particles at ground level, and to link them with the associated primary fluxes to better understand the modulation of CRs in the heliosphere. Another main aim is to monitor this flux to provide operative SpaceWeather information. In particular,we present herean update of the state of theart of the LAGO Antarctic node, to be deployed in the Argentine Marambio base,in the Antarctic peninsula. This node will have the minimum rigidity cut-off($R_c/sim$ 2GV) of the collaboration, and will be the only LAGO node that will be able to observe GLEs. We will present the present LAGO Antarctic campaig nof2017-2018 in Marambio,where a meteorological station will be installed, a thermal control system will be tested, and several tests of telemetry from Antarctic to Buenos Aires will be done.