Conveners
Cosmic Rays
- Henryk Wilczyński (Instytut Fizyki Jądrowej PAN)
The Pierre Auger Observatory, with two decades of data, has significantly advanced our understanding of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) with energies exceeding 10^18 eV. Key results of the Observatory include: precise measurement of the cosmic ray spectrum at the highest energies, observation of anisotropies in UHECR arrival directions, pointing to possible sources and mass composition...
Observations of extensive air showers are used to probe hadronic interactions at energies much higher than in any experiments at man-made accelerators. One important observable, that can provide some constraints on the interaction models, is the muon content of air showers. This observable is also crucial in determination of the composition of the primary cosmic rays - it is expected that the...
It is well-known that the composition of the cosmic ray primary particle changes the characteristics of the air shower it induces, most notably the average atmospheric depth of the shower maximum ($X_{max}$). Showers induced by heavy primaries, such as Fe, develop faster and thus higher in the atmosphere than those induced by their lighter counterparts, like protons. This changes the...
There is a statistically solid (on a six sigma level) correlation between the global seismic activity and changes in the intensity of cosmic radiation recorded at the surface of our planet, dubbed the cosmo-seismic effect (https://press.ifj.edu.pl/en/news/2023/06/14/). The relationship which has recently been found in public data by the Cosmic Ray Extremely Distributed Observatory (CREDO)...
The JEM-EUSO (Joint Exploratory Missions for Extreme Universe Space Observatory) collaboration is an international initiative studying ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) and related phenomena. These particles, with energies exceeding 10$^{20}$ eV, provide insights into extreme astrophysical processes but remain challenging to detect due to their low flux.
At the heart of JEM-EUSO's...
The cosmic rays stream reaching Earth is of extragalactic origin, some come from the center of our Galaxy, while the source of cosmic rays of the lowest energies is Sun. A common way to register galactic cosmic ray (GCR) and its variability are measurements made by a global network of ground neutron monitors (NMs), operating continuously since 1951. They measure secondary cosmic rays: the...
