Instrumentación

 

Observation of Cosmic Ray at the top of the Sierra Negra volcano in Mexico with the SciCRT prototype

 

E. Ortiz, J.F. Valdés-Galicia^a, Y. Matsubara^b, Y. Nagai^b, Y. Muraki^b, A. Hurtado^c, O. Musalem^c, R. Garcia^c, M.A. Anzorena^c, L.X. González^d, Y. Itow^e, T. Sako^e, D. Lopez^e, Y. Sasai^e, K. Munakata^f, C. Kato^f, S. Shibata^g, H. Takamaru^g, H. Kojima^h, K. Watanabeⁱ, H. Tsuchiya^j, and T. Koi^k

 

^a Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, 04510, México.

^b Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan.

^c Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, 04510, México.

^d SCiESMEX, Instituto de Geofísica, Unidad Michoacan, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 58190, Morelia, Michoacan. Mexico.

^e Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan.

^f Department of Physics, Shinshu University, Asahi, Matsumoto 390-8621, Japan.

^g College of Engineering, Chubu University, Kasugai 487-8501, Japan.

^h Faculty of Engineering, Aichi Institute of Technology, Toyota 470-0392, Japan.

ⁱ Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Experiment Agency, Yoshinodai, Chuo-ku, Sagamihara 252-5210, Japan.

^j Japan Atomic Energy Agency, 2-4 Shirakata Shirane, Tokai-mura, Naka-gun, Ibaraki 319-1195, Japan.

^k SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA 94025-7015, USA.

 

Received 10 April 2015;
accepted 25 September 2015

 

Abstract

We are currently in the process of calibration of a new cosmic ray detector called SciBar Cosmic Ray Telescope (SciCRT) located at the top of the Sierra Negra volcano at 4,600 m.a.s.l., in Eastern Mexico. The SciCRT will work mainly as a Solar Neutron and Muon Telescope, with a high angular resolution (~ 1°), but it will also serve as a gamma ray and hadron shower detector. The mini-SciCR is a prototype of the SciCRT, it uses the same scintillator bars and recording hardware, the size of the mini-SciCR is 1/1568 compared with the SciCRT. In this paper we will report the main results obtained with the mini-SciCR that was operating at the top of the Sierra Negra volcano from October 2010 to July 2012. Our main aims were to show the appropriate performance of all the detector systems and to develop a tecnique to separate the flux of soft and hard secondary cosmic rays with the help of a Monte Carlo simulation, our energy range of interest is from 100 MeV to a few GeV. Aditionally we will report results with a modification of the detector setup that helped to confirm the correct identification of the particle species.

Keywords: Cosmic rays; secondary cosmic rays; SciCRT.

PACS: 95.55.Ev; 95.55.Vj; 95.30.Cq; 93.30.Hf

 

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Acknowledgments

The authors sincerely thank the engineer Miguel Angel Garcia Palacio for his technical support. This work was partially supported by PAPIIT-UNAM IN114612 and CONACyT-180727.

 

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