Extensive air showers produced by ultra-high-energetic cosmic rays show a uniform behaviour in terms of their longitudinal and lateral particle distributions; this is referred to as Air-Shower Universality. The resulting implications of this universality can be used to reconstruct observables that are sensitive to the mass of the primary particle. Measuring the exact mass composition of ultra high-energetic cosmic rays will in the end reveal insights about the cosmic mechanisms that accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light. The depth of the air shower maximum as well as the relative amounts of muons and pions in the particle content of the cascade are the important observables for this task.
The Pierre Auger Observatory, located in the Argentinian Pampa Amarilla, uses an array of more than 1600 surface detector stations spanning an area of 3000 km² to detect these air showers. Currently undergoing an upgrade, the stations of the ground detector array of Auger Prime will take use of three different detection techniques to discriminate particles reaching the individual stations. Modelling the spatial and temporal distributions of particle densities dependent on the mass-sensitive parameters of the air showers is the main task of my work. Doing this comprises an analytical approach to air showers and cascades, as well as modern computing techniques to handle extensive simulations and high-level feature analyses.

Theses

• maximilian.stadelmaier ※ unimi.it
• Dipartimento di Fisica
  Università degli Studi di Milano
  Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
  Via Celoria, 16
  20133 Milano, Italia