Extensive air showers and ultra high-energy cosmic rays: a historical review

Abstract

Abstract. The discovery of extensive air showers by Rossi, Schmeiser, Bothe, Kolhörster and Auger at the end of the 1930s, facilitated by the coincidence technique of Bothe and Rossi, led to fundamental contributions in the field of cosmic ray physics and laid the foundation for high-energy particle physics. Soon after World War II a cosmic ray group at MIT in the USA pioneered detailed investigations of air shower phenomena and their experimental skill laid the foundation for many of the methods and much of the instrumentation used today. Soon interests focussed on the highest energies requiring much larger detectors to be operated. The first detection of air fluorescence light by Japanese and US groups in the early 1970s marked an important experimental breakthrough towards this end as it allowed huge volumes of atmosphere to be monitored by optical telescopes. Radio observations of air showers, pioneered in the 1960s, are presently experiencing a renaissance and may revolutionise the field again. In the last 7 decades the research has seen many ups but also a few downs. However, the example of the Cygnus X-3 story demonstrated that even non-confirmable observations can have a huge impact by boosting new instrumentation to make discoveries and shape an entire scientific community.

Proceedings of 2016 International Conference on Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR2016)

“…The signal was claimed to have a significance of 4.4σ and the conclusions seemed to be confirmed from a sub-array at Haverah Park [15]. The claims stimulated great interest and, although now regarded as incorrect, gave a huge stimulus to activity in the fields of high-energy gamma-ray astronomy and ultra-high energy cosmic rays [16]. For the air shower field, an important consequence was the interest that Jim took on the subject.…”

Geant4 simulation of sFLASH experiment

“…The history of cosmic ray observation started from 100 years ago [1][2][3]. Due to the extremely small flux of the ultra high energy comic ray (UHECR), some properties of UHECR are still unclear.…”

Measurement of the Muon Atmospheric Production Depth with the Water Cherenkov Detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory

“…Figure 5.12 (right) shows the "true" and the "O↵ line " distributions of muon delays in a sampling region centered at r s = 1450 m, and for a sample of proton showers simulated using QGSJET-II-04 with E = 10 19.5 The averaged delay of the muons (for the same sample of simulations) as a function of the distance to the shower axis is shown in figure 5. 13. In the left panel, we show the results for two values of : 1% (circles) and 10% (triangles).…”