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| Author(s): |
Camile Mendes Castilho
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Física Gleb Wataghin |
| Defense date: | 2013-02-22 |
| Examining board members: |
Carola Dobrigkeit Chinellato;
Márcio José Menon;
Luiz Vitor de Souza Filho
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| Advisor: | Carola Dobrigkeit Chinellato |
| Abstract | |
Two important questions in the study of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are related to the astrophysical sources of these particles and the characteristics of the magnetic field they have traversed in their way from the sources to Earth. The Pierre Auger Observatory was designed and built in Argentina in order to address these and other questions about ultra-high energy cosmic rays. Its design goals included being able to measure ultra-high energy cosmic rays (above 1 EeV) with unprecedented statistics. Considering that the trajectories of ultra-high energy particles are defected by the magnetic fields traversed and that the defection is inversely proportional to their energies, it can be expected that particles having different energies and coming from a single source will arrive at Earth with their directions aligned on the celestial sphere and with angular deviations satisfying that dependence with the energy. A group of cosmic rays with their directions and energies satisfying those characteristics is called a multiplet. In this work, we search for multiplets in a data sample of 2196 cosmic rays with energies above 20 EeV recorded by the Pierre Auger Observatory between 1st January 2004 and 22nd November 2012. We applied the method of the minimum spanning tree to separate the whole data set into subsets and then analyzed the subsets, checking whether the directions of the cosmic rays in each subset satisfy the expected correlation with the inverse of their energies. After identifying multiplets which satisfy the correlation, it is possible to find theposition of the sources of the cosmic rays and estimate the defection power of the magnetic field these particles must have traversed in the corresponding directions of the sources. In the period covered by our analysis we have found three multiplets with twelve or more events. For each multiplet we have found the direction of the possible source and the defection power of the magnetic field and looked for nearby astrophysical objects in a catalog (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 10/03968-8 - Study of angular correlations in arrival directions of ultra-high energy cosmic rays detected by the Pierre Auger Observatory |
| Grantee: | Camile Mendes Castilho |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Master |