Measurement of cosmic ray elemental composition from the CAKE balloon experiment

Abstract

CAKE (Cosmic Abundances below Knee Energies) was a prototype balloon experiment for the determination of the charge spectra and of abundances of the primary cosmic rays with nuclear charge Z>10. It was a passive instrument made of layers of CR39 R and Lexan R /Makrofol R nuclear track detectors; it had a geometric acceptance of ∼0.7 m 2 sr for Fe nuclei. Here, the scanning and analysis strategies, the algorithms used for the off-line filtering and for the tracking in automated mode of the primary cosmic rays are presented, together with the resulting CR charge distribution and their abundances.

Search for Magnetic Monopoles with the MoEDAL Forward Trapping Detector in 13 TeV Proton-Proton Collisions at the LHC

“…The trapping detector acceptance is defined as the probability that a monopole of given mass, charge, energy and direction would end its trajectory inside the trapping volume. It is determined from the knowledge of the material traversed by the monopole [19] and the ionization energy loss of monopoles when they go through matter [27][28][29][30] implemented in a simulation based on GEANT4 [31]. Simulations with uniform monopole energy distributions allow identification, for various charge and mass combinations, of ranges of kinetic energy and polar angle for which the acceptance is relatively uniform, called fiducial regions.…”

Cosmological Implication of Electroweak Monopole

“…Another possibility is that many of the electroweak monopoles are captured inside stellar objects when they hit (large) stellar objects, because they have a large capture cross section due to the magnetic interaction. In fact a relativistic electroweak monopole with mass 5 TeV is expected to travel less than 10 m in Aluminum before they are trapped [29]. So the electroweak monopoles coming to the earth loose most of the energy passing through the earth atmospheric sphere and become nonrelativistic, and could easily be trapped near the earth surface.…”

Mass spectrometry analysis of etch products from CR-39 plastic irradiated by heavy ions

“…The size of an etch pit is a function of the energy deposited by the heavy ion in the material, referred to as the linear energy transfer (LET). CR-39 has been applied to various fields such as neutron dosimetry [2,3], space radiation dosimetry [4,5], and the study of elemental composition of heavy cosmic rays in high energy astrophysics [6,7]. Despite such successful utilization, the primary problem of ''how is a nuclear track formed in CR-39?''…”