The Extreme Energy Events (EEE) Project is devoted to the detection and study of high-energy cosmic rays. It is a network of 53 muon tracking telescopes made of three Multigap Resistive Plate ...Chambers (MRPC), synchronized by GPS and installed inside high schools distributed on the Italian territory. The EEE Project foresees also the direct involvement of students and teachers in the experiment, from the construction of the detectors to the maintenance, data taking and data analysis. The schools are unconventional experimental sites and a unique test field to check the performance of the MRPC technology. Data from recent coordinated data taking periods have been used to measure the performances and the results of this study are here reported.
Abstract
The Extreme Energy Events experiment (EEE) is a cosmic ray observatory made of about 60 muon telescopes based on Multigap Resistive Plate Chamber (MRPC) detectors. The EEE experiment has two ...main targets: a scientific and a dissemination. The EEE collaboration has also developed a large set of portable scintillator-based detectors, named Cosmic Box (CB), mainly used for educational purposes. The CB allows students to perform cosmic ray counting measurements in several environments. CBs are made of two 15 × 15 × 1 cm scintillators read by two 3 × 3 mm
2
SiPMs operated in coincidence. Three CBs were deployed in Nuraxi Figus and Seruci coal mine to perform an underground measurement of the cosmic muon flux attenuation. High school and university students were directly involved in all the stages of the measurements: from the preliminary measurements to the on-site work and data analysis.
The existence of time correlations in detectors separated by distances much larger than the size of the highest energy extensive air showers (EAS) has been long discussed over the years. Several ...mechanisms have been proposed to justify the existence of such events and, in the last decade, some experiments have also tried to search for correlations on a large scale distance, beyond one hundred kilometers. The approaches were based on the construction of clusters of detectors placed at large relative distances, with the capability of selecting extensive air showers.
Within this context, the Extreme Energy Events (EEE) experiment can provide new inputs in the search for long distance correlations, thanks to its sparse array of muon telescopes spanning all the Italian territory.
The EEE telescopes are taking data since more than 10 years and enough statistics has been already accumulated to be able to search for such events, whose observation is intrinsically difficult due to the very low rates expected, many order of magnitudes smaller than the overall cosmic ray flux. In order to reduce the accidental correlations, different analysis approaches have been investigated for the selection of EAS events with the EEE telescopes. In this paper we will present preliminary results obtained by analyzing a large fraction of the statistics currently available.
A simulation tool based on GEMC framework to describe the MRPC telescope of the Extreme Energy Events (EEE) Project is presented. The EEE experiment is mainly devoted to the study of the secondary ...cosmic muons by using MRPC telescope distributed in high schools and research centres in Italy and at CERN. This takes into account the muon interactions with EEE telescopes and the structures surrounding the experimental apparata; it consists of a dedicated event generator producing realistic muon distribution and a detailed geometry description of the detector. Microscopic behaviour of MRPCs has been included to produce experimental-like data. A method to estimate the chamber efficiency directly from data has been implemented and tested by comparing the experimental and simulated polar angle distribution of muons.
Results from the PolarquEEEst missions Abbrescia, M.; Avanzini, C.; Balbi, G. ...
Journal of physics. Conference series,
06/2020, Letnik:
1561, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The PolarquEEEst scientific programme consists in a series of measurements of the cosmic ray flux up to the highest latitudes. It started in Summer 2018, when three telescopes made out of ...scintillators readout by SiPMs were built and installed in Italy, Norway and on a sailboat leaving from North Island, to circumnavigate the Svalbard archipelago and land in Tromsø. They collected data on a latitude range from 44° N up to 82° N, with a dense sampling of the Northernmost interval. The PolarquEEEst mission continued afterwards with a series of measurements in Italy, Southward reaching Lampedusa, and in Germany. In May 2019 the PolarquEEEst collaboration accomplished another important result, installing a cosmic ray observatory for the detection of secondary cosmic muons at Ny Alesund, at 79° N, made of three independent identical detectors positioned a few hundred meters from each other, and synchronized in order to operate together as a network. The configuration used will allow high precision measurements never performed before at these latitudes on a long term, also interesting for their connection with environmental phenomena. The network will also complement the existing stations for the detection of cosmic neutrons at the Svalbard archipelago, enlarging by far the physics scope that is possible to pursue in this field at this peculiar location. Here the various missions are presented, and some preliminary results from the measurements performed are shown.
The EEE (Extreme Energy Events) Project is an experiment for the detection of cosmic ray muons by means of a sparse array of telescopes, each made of three Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPC), ...distributed over all the Italian territory and at CERN. The main scientific goals of the Project are the investigation of the properties of the local muon flux, the detection of Extensive Air Showers (EAS) and the search for long-distance correlations between far telescopes. The Project is also characterized by a strong educational and outreach aspect since the telescopes are managed by teams of students and teachers who had previously constructed them at CERN. In this paper an overall description of the experiment is given, including the design, construction and performance of the telescopes. The operation of the whole array, which currently consists of more than 50 telescopes, is also presented by showing the most recent physics results.
Cosmic ray muons are a penetrating component of extensive air showers created in the Earth atmosphere by the interaction of highly energetic primary particles, mostly protons, which continuously ...bombard our Planet. The secondary cosmic radiation is the result of the complex interplay between the production cross section and the interaction mechanisms with the atmosphere (including the energy loss, multiple scattering and particle decay). Cosmic muons have been considered since several decades as a powerful probe to exploit our environment, from muography of volcanoes to absorption radiography of possible hidden rooms inside large structures, such as Pyramids, to the detection of high-Z illicit nuclear materials inside containers and many other applications of social interest. This paper discusses the possibility to employ the Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPC) of the Extreme Energy Events (EEE) Project as muon tracking detectors to monitor the long term stability of civil buildings and structures when used in conjunction with additional detectors. For this application the average direction of the cosmic muon tracks passing through the MRPC telescope and an additional detector located some distance apart in the same building may be reconstructed with good precision and any small variation over long time acquisition periods may be monitored. The performance of such setup is discussed and experimental results from first coincidence measurements obtained with a 40 × 60 cm2 scintillator detector operated in the same building with one of the EEE telescopes, at about 15 m vertical distance from it, are presented. Simple Monte Carlo and GEANT simulations were also carried out to evaluate typical acceptance values for the operating conditions employed so far, to extrapolate to other geometrical configurations, and to evaluate multiple scattering effects.
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