Speaker
Dr
Francesca Bisconti
(Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Description
EUSO-TA is a pathfinder experiment for the space based JEM-EUSO mission for the detection of
ultra-high energy cosmic rays.
EUSO-TA is a fluorescence detector installed in front of the Black Rock Mesa fluorescence
detectors of the Telescope Array (TA) experiment, in Utah (USA). At the TA site, an Electron
Light Source and a Central Laser Facility are installed for calibration purposes, since they emit
laser and electron beams respectively, with known energy and geometry.
EUSO-TA consists of two 1 m Fresnel lenses, with a field of view of 10.5°, that focus the light on
a Photo Detector Module (PDM). The PDM currently consists of 36 Hamamatsu Multi-Anode
Photo-Multipliers Tubes (MAPMTs) with 64 channels each. Front-End readout is performed by
36 ASICS, with trigger and readout tasks performed by two FPGA boards that send the data to a
CPU and a storage system.
The detector was installed in February 2015. Tests using the mentioned light sources have been
performed and observations of cosmic ray events, as well as those of stars with different magnitude
and color index have been done. The data acquisitions are triggered by TA fluorescence detectors,
although a self-trigger algorithm is currently in the last phases of development and test. TA, with
its large field of view and the surface detectors, allows the cosmic ray shower events’ track
reconstruction and with the reconstruction parameters simulations using Offline are performed.
Simulations of the detected events are compared with data and the results are shown in this work.
Primary author
Dr
Francesca Bisconti
(Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
