info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Aerosol Characterization at the Pierre Auger Obsrevatory
Fecha
2013Registro en:
Aerosol Characterization at the Pierre Auger Obsrevatory; 33rd International Cosmic Ray Conference; Rio de Janeiro; Brasil; 2013; 2322-2325
978-1-5108-1008-2
CONICET Digital
CONICET
Autor
Micheletti, Maria Isabel
Davidson, Jorge
Debray, Mario Ernesto
Freire, Martín Miguel
Masek, M.
Piacentini, Ruben Dario Narciso
Rosenbusch, Mariana Lidia
Somacal, Héctor Rubén
Resumen
The Pierre Auger Observatory is a hybrid facility composed of surface and fluorescence detectors (denoted as SD and FD, respectively), where the FD system sets the energy scale in cosmic ray shower reconstruction. Atmospheric components attenuate the fluorescence light emitted by the de-excitation of atmospheric nitrogen, previously excited by the charged particles of the shower. Amongst these components, atmospheric aerosols are the ones with the largest fluctuations, being responsible for one of the major uncertainties in shower reconstruction with FD data. We present a detailed characterization of aerosols. They are collected at the Observatory and analyzed, in morphology and elemental composition, with experimental techniques used for the first time in a cosmic ray observatory: gravimetry, PIXE and SEM/EDX. An analysis of wind trajectories using the program HYSPLIT is used to understand the sources and the evolution of aerosols. The aerosols are further characterized by the FRAM, an optical telescope employed to perform CCD photometry of selected Landolt fields, in which we observe sets of precisely measured standard stars at various wavelengths. Using this photometric information we then compute the Angstr ˚ om coefficients that also characterize the size of aerosols.