INVESTIGADORES
HANSEN Patricia Maria
artículos
Título:
Calibration of the underground muon detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory
Autor/es:
THE PIERRE AUGER COLLABORATION (P HANSEN PERTENECE A LA COLABORACIÓN AUGER)
Revista:
JOURNAL OF INSTRUMENTATION
Editorial:
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
Referencias:
Lugar: Londres; Año: 2021
ISSN:
1748-0221
Resumen:
To obtain direct measurements of the muon content of extensive air showers with energyabove 1016?5 eV, the Pierre Auger Observatory is currently being equipped with an undergroundmuon detector (UMD), consisting of 219 10m2-modules, each segmented into 64 scintillatorscoupled to silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs). Direct access to the shower muon content allows forthe study of both of the composition of primary cosmic rays and of high-energy hadronic interactionsin the forward direction. As the muon density can vary between tens of muons per m2 close to theintersection of the shower axis with the ground to much less than one per m2 when far away, thenecessary broad dynamic range is achieved by the simultaneous implementation of two acquisitionmodes in the read-out electronics: the binary mode, tuned to count single muons, and the ADCmode, suited to measure a high number of them. In this work, we present the end-to-end calibrationof the muon detector modules: first, the SiPMs are calibrated by means of the binary channel, andthen, the ADC channel is calibrated using atmospheric muons, detected in parallel to the showerdata acquisition. The laboratory and field measurements performed to develop the implementationof the full calibration chain of both binary and ADC channels are presented and discussed. Thecalibration procedure is reliable to work with the high amount of channels in the UMD, which willbe operated continuously, in changing environmental conditions, for several years.