First results of the cosmic ray NUCLEON experiment

Abstract

The NUCLEON experiment was designed to study the chemical composition and energy spectra of galactic cosmic ray nuclei from protons to zinc at energies of ∼ 10 11 -10 15 eV per particle. The research was carried out with the NUCLEON scientific equipment installed on the Russian satellite "Resource-P" No. 2 as an additional payload. This article presents the results for the measured nuclei spectra related to the first approximately 250 days of the scientific data collection during 2015 and 2016. The all-particle spectrum and the spectra of p, He, C, O, Ne, Mg, Si and Fe are presented. Some interesting ratios of the spectra are also presented and discussed. The experiment is now in its beginning stage and the data still have a preliminary character, but they already give numerous indications of the existence of various non-canonical phenomena in the physics of cosmic rays, which are expressed in the violation of a simple universal power law of the energy spectra. These features of the data are briefly discussed.

Indication of nearby source signatures of cosmic rays from energy spectra and anisotropies

“…3 Results Figure 1 shows the energy spectra of protons and helium from the model predictions compared with the measurements by AMS-02 [15,45], CREAM-III [20], NUCLEON [46], KASCADE [47] and KASCADE-Grande [39]. The red, blue and black lines represent the contributions from the local source, the background sources and the sum of them, respectively.…”

TeV solar gamma rays from cosmic-ray interactions

“…We find that the gamma-ray flux is increased by an overall factor 1.8, with a small energy dependence due to a slightly different spectral shape between the proton and helium. We also consider the case in which the helium spectrum may be harder than 2.7 at high energies [46][47][48]. If we use a spectral index of 2.58 [47] for extrapolation, our result changes by less than 20% near 10 TeV.…”

Direct Measurement of the Cosmic-Ray Proton Spectrum from 50 GeV to 10 TeV with the Calorimetric Electron Telescope on the International Space Station

“…Furthermore, the spectral hardening observed in the spectra of various nuclei [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] calls for the extensive attempts to theoretically interpret these unexpected phenomena. The current experimental approaches to direct measurements of the proton spectrum are based on two main classes of instruments, i.e., magnetic spectrometers [5,6] at lower energies where the presence of a spectral breakpoint was observed, and calorimeters [1,4,8,33,34] at higher energies where the spectrum undergoes a hardening. It is of particular interest to determine the onset of spectral hardening and its development in terms of index variation and smoothness parameter (as defined in Ref.…”