Abstract
All known small solar system bodies have diameters between a few meters and a few thousands of kilometers. Based on the collisional evolution of solar system bodies, a larger number of ...asteroids with diameters down to ∼2 m is thought to exist. As all solar system bodies, small bodies can be passive sources of high-energy gamma-rays, produced by the interaction of energetic cosmic rays impinging on their surfaces. Since the majority of known asteroids are in orbits between Mars and Jupiter (in a region known as the Main Belt), we expect them to produce a diffuse emission close to the ecliptic plane. In this work, we have studied the gamma-ray emission coming from the ecliptic using the data collected by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard the Fermi satellite. We have fit the results with simulations of the gamma-ray intensity at the source level (calculated with the software
FLUKA
) to constrain the small solar system bodies population. Finally, we have proposed a model describing the distribution of asteroid sizes and we have used the LAT data to constrain the gamma-ray emission expected from this model and, in turn, on the model itself.
Over its ten years of mission the Large Area Telescope onboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has collected the largest ever sample of high-energy cosmic-ray electron and positron events. ...Possible features in their energy spectrum could be a signature of the presence of nearby astrophysical sources or of more exotic sources, such as annihilation or decay of dark matter (DM) particles in the Galaxy. We will present the results of the search for possible delta-like line features in the cosmic-ray electron and positron spectrum. We will also present the results of the search for possible features originating from DM particles annihilating into electron-positron pairs. We are able to set constraints on DM masses up to 1.7TeV/c2 and exclude the thermal value of the relic annihilation cross section for DM candidates lighter than 150 GeV/c2.
Studies in many areas of particle and astroparticle physics require a good knowledge of hadron spectra produced at small angles to the primary particle direction, e.g. in the TeV energy range at the ...LHC. The present work is dedicated to development of a particle identification technique based on the transition radiation produced by highly relativistic particles. Dedicated experimental studies were carried out and simulation models were developed to reproduce experimental data obtained with different prototypes. On the basis of these studies, the possibility of making detectors able to provide hadron composition measurement with high accuracy and identify particles with high efficiency in the forward experiments at the LHC was demonstrated. Two concepts of large scale TRDs are proposed: the straw TRD and the GaAs/straw TRD. They allow the reconstruction of hadron spectra with accuracy about or below 1% and to identify particles with high efficiency in individual events. As an example, suppression of the combinatorial background was demonstrated for the D0→K−π+ and D̄0→K+π− decays.
The measured fluxes of secondary particles produced by the interactions of Cosmic Rays (CRs) with the astronomical environment play a crucial role in understanding the physics of CR transport. In ...this work we present a comprehensive calculation of the secondary hadron, lepton, gamma-ray and neutrino yields produced by the inelastic interactions between several species of stable or long-lived cosmic rays projectiles (p, D, T, 3He, 4He, 6Li, 7Li, 9Be, 10Be, 10B, 11B, 12C, 13C, 14C, 14N, 15N, 16O, 17O, 18O, 20Ne, 24Mg and 28Si) and different target gas nuclei (p, 4He, 12C, 14N, 16O, 20Ne, 24Mg, 28Si and 40Ar). The yields are calculated using FLUKA, a simulation package designed to compute the energy distributions of secondary products with large accuracy in a wide energy range. The present results provide, for the first time, a complete and self-consistent set of all the relevant inclusive cross sections regarding the whole spectrum of secondary products in nuclear collisions. We cover, for the projectiles, a kinetic energy range extending from 0.1 GeV/n up to 100 TeV/n in the lab frame. In order to show the importance of our results for multi-messenger studies about the physics of CR propagation, we evaluate the propagated spectra of Galactic secondary nuclei, leptons, and gamma rays produced by the interactions of CRs with the interstellar gas, exploiting the numerical codes DRAGON and GammaSky. We show that, adopting our cross section database, we are able to provide a good fit of a complete sample of CR observables, including: leptonic and hadronic spectra measured at Earth, the local interstellar spectra measured by Voyager, and the gamma-ray emissivities from Fermi-LAT collaboration. We also show a set of gamma-ray and neutrino full-sky maps and spectra.
We implemented a novel technique to perform the collective spectral analysis of sets of multiple gamma-ray point sources using the data collected by the Large Area Telescope onboard the Fermi ...satellite. The energy spectra of the sources are reconstructed starting from the photon counts and without assuming any spectral model for both the sources and the background. In case of faint sources, upper limits on their fluxes are evaluated with a Bayesian approach. This analysis technique is very useful when several sources with similar spectral features are studied, such as sources of gamma rays from annihilation of dark matter particles. We present the results obtained by applying this analysis to a sample of dwarf spheroidal galaxies and to the Milky Way dark matter halo. The analysis of dwarf spheroidal galaxies yields upper limits on the product of the dark matter pair annihilation cross section and the relative velocity of annihilating particles that are well below those predicted by the canonical thermal relic scenario in a mass range from a few GeV to a few tens of GeV for some annihilation channels.
The ecological transition of the extreme energy events experiment Abbrescia, M.; Avanzini, C.; Baldini, L. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
10/2023, Letnik:
1055
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The need for reducing the emission of gases, potentially contributing to the greenhouse effect and climate change, has impacted many fields, including scientific research. The Extreme Energy Event ...(EEE) collaboration started, already several years ago, a series of tests aiming at finding a more eco-friendly replacement for the gases used in the Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPCs) of its network.
These tests identified a promising binary gas mixture, and data taking has begun with a subset of the telescopes of the EEE network, making EEE the first experiment in the world completely implemented with MRPCs and operating with an eco-friendly gas mixture. Here the results of the tests and a preliminary comparison of the telescope performance measured with the standard (non eco-friendly) and the new eco-friendly gas mixtures are presented and discussed.
ABSTRACT The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) has provided the most detailed view to date of the emission toward the Galactic center (GC) in high-energy γ-rays. This paper describes the analysis of ...data taken during the first 62 months of the mission in the energy range 1-100 GeV from a 15° × 15° region about the direction of the GC. Specialized interstellar emission models (IEMs) are constructed to enable the separation of the γ-ray emissions produced by cosmic ray particles interacting with the interstellar gas and radiation fields in the Milky Way into that from the inner ∼1 kpc surrounding the GC, and that from the rest of the Galaxy. A catalog of point sources for the 15° × 15° region is self-consistently constructed using these IEMs: the First Fermi-LAT Inner Galaxy Point Source Catalog (1FIG). The spatial locations, fluxes, and spectral properties of the 1FIG sources are presented, and compared with γ-ray point sources over the same region taken from existing catalogs. After subtracting the interstellar emission and point-source contributions a residual is found. If templates that peak toward the GC are used to model the positive residual the agreement with the data improves, but none of the additional templates tried account for all of its spatial structure. The spectrum of the positive residual modeled with these templates has a strong dependence on the choice of IEM.
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