Speaker
Mr
Georgy Kornakov
(Univ. Santiago de Compostela)
Description
In the last months of 2009, during the commissioning of the HADES tRPC TOF wall at the GSI (Darmstadt, Germany), more than 500 million cosmic ray data were taken with a precision in time measurement below 100ps for each tRPC cell. The six sectors, with an area greater than 1 square meter each, were placed horizontally in pairs, with their axes pointing in the direction east-west, and a distance of about 30cm. Each sector consisted on two layers of RPC cells partially overlapped to avoid dead zones and each cell was read-out from both ends so that in the optimal case, a cosmic particle went through up to 4 cells allowing a fit of high quality. The mean position resolution was approximately 1cm in north-south and about 3cm in the east-west directions. The mean granularity of each detector was about 20cm2. This arrangement allows us to reconstruct the arrival direction of cosmic rays with an accuracy of about 1 degree in the north-south and about 3 degrees east-west directions.
Although data were taken over an surface of scarcely one square meter, the knowledge of the very accurate time of arrival of the particles, together with its position and direction, has allowed us an analysis of the temporal structure of the fronts of cosmic air showers and their correlations with the direction of incidence of the particles of the showers never made so far. The results can be of interest to understand the evolution of cosmic ray showers in the atmosphere and to find new signatures allowing a better estimation of the variables describing the primary cosmic rays incident upon the Earth.
Primary author
Mr
Georgy Kornakov
(Univ. Santiago de Compostela)
Co-author
Dr
Juan A. Garzón
(Univ. Santiago de Compostela)
