In 2008, the blazar Markarian 421 entered a very active phase and was one of the brightest sources in the sky at TeV energies, showing frequent flaring episodes. Using the data of ARGO-YBJ, a full coverage air shower detector located at Yangbajing (4300 m a.s.l., Tibet), we monitored the source at gamma-ray energies E > 0.3 TeV during the whole year. The observed flux was variable, with the strongest flares in March and June, in correlation with X-ray enhanced activity. While during specific episodes the TeV flux could be several times larger than the Crab Nebula one, the average emission from day 41 to 180 was almost twice the Crab level, with an integral flux of (3.6 ± 0.6) × 10 −11 photons cm −2 s −1 for energies E > 1 TeV, and decreased afterward. This Letter concentrates on the flares that occurred in the first half of June. This period has been deeply studied from optical to 100 MeV gamma rays, and partially up to TeV energies, since the moonlight hampered the Cherenkov telescope observations during the most intense part of the emission. Our data complete these observations, with the detection of a signal with a statistical significance of 3.8 standard deviations on June 11-13, corresponding to a gamma-ray flux about 6 times larger than the Crab one above 1 TeV. The reconstructed differential spectrum, corrected for the intergalactic absorption, can be represented by a power law with an index α = −2.1 +0.7 −0.5 extending up to several TeV. The spectrum slope is fully consistent with previous observations reporting a correlation between the flux and the spectral index, suggesting that this property is maintained in different epochs and characterizes the source emission processes.
The proton-air cross section in the energy range 1-100 TeV has been measured by the ARGO-YBJ cosmic ray experiment. The analysis is based on the primary cosmic ray flux attenuation for different atmospheric depths (i.e. zenith angles) and exploits the detector capabilities of selecting the shower development stage by means of hit multiplicity, density and lateral profile measurements at ground. The effects of shower fluctuations, the contribution of heavier primaries and the uncertainties of the hadronic interaction models, have been taken into account. The results have been used to estimate the total protonproton cross section at center-of-mass energies between 70 and 500 GeV, where no accelerator data are currently available.
The ARGO-YBJ experiment has been designed to study the extensive air showers with an energy threshold lower than that of the existing arrays by exploiting the high altitude location (4300 m a.s.l. in Tibet, PR China) and the full ground plane coverage. The lower energy limit of the detector (E ˜ 1 GeV) is reached by the scaler mode technique, i.e. recording the counting rate at fixed time intervals. At these energies, transient signals due to local (e.g. Forbush decreases) and cosmological (e.g. Gamma ray bursts) phenomena are expected as a significant variation of the counting rate compared to the background. In this paper, the performance of the ARGO-YBJ detector operating in scaler mode is described and discussed
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.