The Pierre Auger Observatory status and latest results

Pierre Auger Collaboration

    Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

    Abstract

    The Pierre Auger Observatory, in Argentina, is the present flagship experiment studying ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). Facing the challenge due to low cosmic-ray flux at the highest energies, the Observatory has been taking data for more than a decade, reaching an exposure of over 50 000 km2 sr yr. The combination of a large surface detector array and fluorescence telescopes provides a substantial improvement in energy calibration and extensive air shower measurements, resulting in data of unprecedented quality. Moreover, the installation of a denser subarray has allowed extending the sensitivity to lower energies. Altogether, this contributes to provide important information on key questions in the UHECR field in the energy range from 0.1 EeV up to 100 EeV. A review of main results from the Pierre Auger Observatory is presented with a particular focus on the energy spectrum measurements, the mass composition studies, the arrival directions analyses, the search for neutral cosmic messengers, and the investigation of high-energy hadronic interactions. Despite this large amount of valuable results, the understanding of the nature of UHECRs and of their origin remains an open science case that the Auger collaboration is planning to address with the AugerPrime project to upgrade the Observatory.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Article number02017
    JournalEPJ Web of Conferences
    Volume136
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Mar 23 2017
    Event6th Roma International Conference on Astroparticle Physics, RICAP 2016 - Frascati, Roma, Italy
    Duration: Jun 21 2016Jun 24 2016

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • General Physics and Astronomy

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