We present the first measurement of the fluctuations in the number of muons in extensive air showers produced by ultrahigh energy cosmic rays. We find that the measured fluctuations are in good ...agreement with predictions from air shower simulations. This observation provides new insights into the origin of the previously reported deficit of muons in air shower simulations and constrains models of hadronic interactions at ultrahigh energies. Our measurement is compatible with the muon deficit originating from small deviations in the predictions from hadronic interaction models of particle production that accumulate as the showers develop.
Abstract
A promising energy range to look for angular correlations between cosmic rays of extragalactic origin and their sources is at the highest energies, above a few tens of EeV (1 EeV ≡ 10
18
...eV). Despite the flux of these particles being extremely low, the area of ∼3000 km
2
covered at the Pierre Auger Observatory, and the 17 yr data-taking period of the
Phase
1
of its operations, have enabled us to measure the arrival directions of more than 2600 ultra-high-energy cosmic rays above 32 EeV. We publish this data set, the largest available at such energies from an integrated exposure of 122,000 km
2
sr yr, and search it for anisotropies over the 3.4
π
steradians covered with the Observatory. Evidence for a deviation in excess of isotropy at intermediate angular scales, with ∼15° Gaussian spread or ∼25° top-hat radius, is obtained at the 4
σ
significance level for cosmic-ray energies above ∼40 EeV.
This paper presents the message passing interface (MPI)-based parallelization of the three-dimensional hydrodynamic model SHYFEM (System of HydrodYnamic Finite Element Modules). The original ...sequential version of the code was parallelized in order to reduce the execution time of high-resolution configurations using state-of-the-art high-performance computing (HPC) systems. A distributed memory approach was used, based on the MPI. Optimized numerical libraries were used to partition the unstructured grid (with a focus on load balancing) and to solve the sparse linear system of equations in parallel in the case of semi-to-fully implicit time stepping. The parallel implementation of the model was validated by comparing the outputs with those obtained from the sequential version. The performance assessment demonstrates a good level of scalability with a realistic configuration used as benchmark.
We present a measurement of the cosmic-ray spectrum above 100 PeV using the part of the surface detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory that has a spacing of 750 m. An inflection of the spectrum is ...observed, confirming the presence of the so-called
second-knee
feature. The spectrum is then combined with that of the 1500 m array to produce a single measurement of the flux, linking this spectral feature with the three additional breaks at the highest energies. The combined spectrum, with an energy scale set calorimetrically via fluorescence telescopes and using a single detector type, results in the most statistically and systematically precise measurement of spectral breaks yet obtained. These measurements are critical for furthering our understanding of the highest energy cosmic rays.
Instantons, which are nonperturbative solutions to Yang-Mills equations, provide a signal for the occurrence of quantum tunneling between distinct classes of vacua. They can give rise to decays of ...particles otherwise forbidden. Using data collected at the Pierre Auger Observatory, we search for signatures of such instanton-induced processes that would be suggestive of super-heavy particles decaying in the Galactic halo. These particles could have been produced during the post-inflationary epoch and match the relic abundance of dark matter inferred today. The nonobservation of the signatures searched for allows us to derive a bound on the reduced coupling constant of gauge interactions in the dark sector: α_{X}≲0.09, for 10^{9}≲M_{X}/GeV<10^{19}. Conversely, we obtain that, for instance, a reduced coupling constant α_{X}=0.09 excludes masses M_{X}≳3×10^{13} GeV. In the context of dark matter production from gravitational interactions alone, we illustrate how these bounds are complementary to those obtained on the Hubble rate at the end of inflation from the nonobservation of tensor modes in the cosmological microwave background.
The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is one of the biggest international efforts aimed at better understanding the past, present, and future of climate changes in a multi-model context. A ...total of 21 model intercomparison projects (MIPs) were endorsed in its sixth phase (CMIP6), which included 190 different experiments that were used to simulate 40 000 years and produced around 40 PB of data in total. This paper presents the main findings obtained from the CPMIP (the Computational Performance Model Intercomparison Project), a collection of a common set of metrics, specifically designed for assessing climate model performance. These metrics were exclusively collected from the production runs of experiments used in CMIP6 and primarily from institutions within the IS-ENES3 consortium. The document presents the full set of CPMIP metrics per institution and experiment, including a detailed analysis and discussion of each of the measurements. During the analysis, we found a positive correlation between the core hours needed, the complexity of the models, and the resolution used. Likewise, we show that between 5 %-15 % of the execution cost is spent in the coupling between independent components, and it only gets worse by increasing the number of resources. From the data, it is clear that queue times have a great impact on the actual speed achieved and have a huge variability across different institutions, ranging from none to up to 78 % execution overhead. Furthermore, our evaluation shows that the estimated carbon footprint of running such big simulations within the IS-ENES3 consortium is 1692 t of CO.sub.2 equivalent.
We show, for the first time, radio measurements of the depth of shower maximum (X_{max}) of air showers induced by cosmic rays that are compared to measurements of the established fluorescence method ...at the same location. Using measurements at the Pierre Auger Observatory we show full compatibility between our radio and the previously published fluorescence dataset, and between a subset of air showers observed simultaneously with both radio and fluorescence techniques, a measurement setup unique to the Pierre Auger Observatory. Furthermore, we show radio X_{max} resolution as a function of energy and demonstrate the ability to make competitive high-resolution X_{max} measurements with even a sparse radio array. With this, we show that the radio technique is capable of cosmic-ray mass composition studies, both at Auger and at other experiments.
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