PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) is a satellite-borne experiment. It was launched on June 15th 2006 from the Baikonur space centre on board the Russian ...Resurs-DK1 satellite. For about 10 years PAMELA took data, giving a fundamental contribution to the cosmic ray physics. It made high-precision measurements of the charged component of the cosmic radiation challenging the standard model of the mechanisms of production, acceleration and propagation of cosmic rays in the galaxy and in the heliosphere. PAMELA gave results on different topics on a very wide range of energy. Moreover, the long PAMELA life gives the possibility to study the variation of the proton, electron and positron spectra during the last solar minimum. The time dependence of the cosmic-ray proton and helium nuclei from the solar minimum through the following period of solar maximum activity is currently being studied. Low energy particle spectra were accurately measured also for various solar events that occurred during the PAMELA mission. In this paper a review of main PAMELA results will be reported.
The energy spectra of galactic cosmic rays carry fundamental information regarding their origin and propagation, but, near Earth, cosmic rays are significantly affected by the solar magnetic field ...which changes over time. The time dependence of proton and electron spectra were measured from July 2006 to December 2009 by PAMELA experiment, that is a ballooon-borne experiment collecting data since 15 June 2006. These studies allowed to obtain a more complete description of the cosmic radiation, providing fundamental information about the transport and modulation of cosmic rays inside the heliosphere. The study of the time dependence of the cosmic-ray protons and helium nuclei from the unusual 23rd solar minimum through the following period of solar maximum activity is presented.
The Large Hadron Collider is intensively used to test hadronic interaction models used in cosmic-ray physics because its maximum (designed) collision energy √s = 14 TeV corresponds to the interaction ...of a 1017 eV cosmic-ray proton hitting the atmosphere. In this paper various types of forward experiments at the LHC, where the particles relevant to the air shower development are observed, are reviewed. Recent results of a dedicated experiment for precise forward measurement, the LHC forward, are discussed in detail. A future possibility at the LHC, light ion collisions, is also discussed.
The LHCf experiment, optimized for the study of forward physics at LHC, completes its main physics program in this year 2015, with the proton-proton collisions at the energy of 13 TeV. LHCf gives ...important results on the study of neutral particles at extreme pseudo-rapidity, both for proton-proton and for proton-ion interactions. These results are an important reference for tuning the models of the hadronic interaction currently used for the simulation of the atmospheric showers induced by very high energy cosmic rays. The results of this analysis and the future perspective are presented in this paper.
The magnetic spectrometer of the PAMELA satellite experiment Adriani, O.; Bonechi, L.; Bongi, M. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
09/2003, Volume:
511, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In this paper, we describe in detail the design and the construction of the magnetic spectrometer of the
PAMELA experiment, that will be launched during 2003 to do a precise measurement of the energy ...spectra of the antimatter components in cosmic rays. This paper will mainly focus on the detailed description of the tracking system and on the solutions adopted to deal with the technical challenges that are required to build a very precise detector to be used in the hostile space environment.
We report an accurate measurement of the geomagnetically trapped proton fluxes for kinetic energy above ~70 MeV performed by the PAMELA mission at low Earth orbits (350 / 610 km). Data were analyzed ...in the frame of the adiabatic theory of charged particle motion in the geomagnetic field. Flux properties were investigated in detail, providing a full characterization of the particle radiation in the South Atlantic Anomaly region, including locations, energy spectra, and pitch angle distributions. PAMELA results significantly improve the description of the Earth's radiation environment at low altitudes, placing important constraints on the trapping and interaction processes, and can be used to validate current trapped particle radiation models.
LHCf Experiment: Physics Results Bongi, M.; Adriani, O.; Berti, E. ...
Nuclear and particle physics proceedings,
10/2016, Volume:
279-281
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
LHCf is an experiment designed to study the forward emission of neutral particles produced in proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions at the LHC. The detectors consists of a pair of ...electromagnetic sampling calorimeters installed on both sides of the ATLAS interaction point IP1 at a distance of 140 m, covering the pseudorapidity range from 8.4 to infinity. The experiment has successfully measured the energy spectra of gamma rays, neutral pions and neutrons in p-p collisions at 0.9 TeV and 7 TeV, and of neutral pions in p-Pb collisions at 5.02 TeV and in p-p collisions at 2.76 TeV. The most recent data set has been acquired during a special physics run of p-p collisions at 13 TeV in June 2015 after the restart of the LHC. This set of measurements represent an useful contribution to the calibration and tuning of the hadronic interaction models used for the simulation of atmospheric showers induced by very-high energy cosmic rays, as the measured energy interval corresponds to the range 1014 - 1017 eV in the laboratory frame.
The LHCf experiment is one of the LHC forward experiments. The aim is to measure the energy and the transverse momentum spectra of photons, neutrons and pi 0 's at the very forward region (the ...pseudo-rapidity range of h > 8.4), which should be critical data to calibrate hadron interaction models used in the air shower simulations. LHCf successfully operated at s = 900 GeV and s = 7 TeV proton-proton collisions in 2009 and 2010. We present the first physics result, single photon energy spectra at s = 7 TeV proton-proton collisions and the pseudo-rapidity ranges of h > 10.94 and 8.81 < h < 8.9 . The obtained spectra were compared with the predictions by several hadron interaction models and the models do not reproduce the experimental results perfectly.
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