Reconstruction of inclined air showers detected with the Pierre Auger Observatory

AUGER COLLABORATION (VER F. SANCHEZ EN PUBL. ADJUNTA)

JOURNAL OF COSMOLOGY AND ASTROPARTICLE PHYSICS

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2014

1475-7516

We describe the method devised to reconstruct inclined cosmic-ray air showers with zenith angles greater than 60◦ detected with the surface array of the Pierre Auger Ob- servatory. The measured signals at the ground level are fitted to muon density distributions predicted with atmospheric cascade models to obtain the relative shower size as an over- all normalization parameter. The method is evaluated using simulated showers to test its performance. The energy of the cosmic rays is calibrated using a sub-sample of events recon- structed with both the fluorescence and surface array techniques. The reconstruction method described here provides the basis of complementary analyses including an independent mea- surement of the energy spectrum of ultra-high energy cosmic rays using very inclined events collected by the Pierre Auger Observatory.