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PolarquEEEst2019: EEE@NyAlesund (EEENYA)
Call year: 2019
Status: active
IADC_id: 149
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Project description:
We propose to install a cosmic ray observatory for the detection of secondary cosmic muons at Ny Alesund, made of three independent identical detectors positioned at a few hundred meters from each other, and synchronized in order to operate together as a network. The proposed configuration would allow measurements never performed before at these latitudes, also interesting for their connection with environmental processes. It would 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.rnrnThe detectors will be equipped with GPS, providing a time stamp to each recorded event at a few nanosecond precision. This is a fundamental feature of the project, since it will allow to search for correlations in time among the events recorded at the three stations, making it possible to identify the very high energy Extensive Atmospheric Showers with a front at the ground large enough to impinge at the same time in the whole region of interest, and in the meantime rejecting the low energy background. The three detectors, therefore, would mainly operate as network, and not as single detectors. In addition, using a network of three detectors would allow, by means of triangulation, to reconstruct the direction of arrival of the cosmic radiation, opening the possibility to search for any anisotropy in the cosmic radiation distribution, particularly interesting so close to the magnetic North Pole.rnrnThis kind of studies would be completely unprecedented at these latitudes, since the detectors at Koldway and Barenstburg are mainly sensitive to the low energy cosmic rays component, which is the most abundant and less interesting, and do not have any directional capability. Nevertheless, it would be important to relate the high energy shower component revealed by the EEE detectors with the neutron part, and this, again, would represent a measure never performed at these latitudes, and a nice example of international scientific collaboration and integration in the existing infrastructure.rnrnIn addition to operating as a network, the three detectors can perform interesting measurements locally, i.e. at the level of the single detector, measuring just the muon flux and its variations in connection with transient astrophysical phenomena, among them the detection of Forbush decreases connected with Solar Flare followed by Coronal Mass Emissions
National/International Cooperation:
Internation Cooperation made from:rn- Italy: the Extreme Energy Events Collaboration, about 70 authors from a dozen of Universities and INFN Sections, in charge of detector installation, and data analysisrn- Norway: a team from University of Oslo, in charge of remote monitoring and data analysisrn- Spain: a team from University of Santiago de Compostela, in charge of studying correlations between cosmic rays flux and conditions in the high atmosphere.
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