B. Fick - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by B. Fick
Technical reports on operations and features of the Pierre Auger Observatory, including ongoing a... more Technical reports on operations and features of the Pierre Auger Observatory, including ongoing and planned enhancements and the status of the future northern hemisphere portion of the Observatory. Contributions to the 31st International Cosmic Ray Conference, Lodz, Poland, July 2009.
Journal of Instrumentation
The atmospheric depth of the air shower maximum X max is an observable commonly used for the dete... more The atmospheric depth of the air shower maximum X max is an observable commonly used for the determination of the nuclear mass composition of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. Direct measurements of X max are performed using observations of the longitudinal shower development with fluorescence telescopes. At the same time, several methods have been proposed for an indirect estimation of X max from the characteristics of the shower particles registered with surface detector arrays. In this paper, we present a deep neural network (DNN) for the estimation of X max. The reconstruction relies on the signals induced by shower particles in the ground based water-Cherenkov detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory. The network architecture features recurrent long short-term memory layers to process the temporal structure of signals and hexagonal convolutions to exploit the symmetry of the surface detector array. We evaluate the performance of the network using air showers simulated with three ...
Astroparticle Physics, 2012
We present the sensitivity of HAWC to Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). HAWC is a very high-energy gammara... more We present the sensitivity of HAWC to Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). HAWC is a very high-energy gammaray observatory currently under construction in Mexico at an altitude of 4100 m. It will observe atmospheric air showers via the water Cherenkov method. HAWC will consist of 300 large water tanks instrumented with 4 photomultipliers each. HAWC has two data acquisition (DAQ) systems. The main DAQ system reads out coincident signals in the tanks and reconstructs the direction and energy of individual atmospheric showers. The scaler DAQ counts the hits in each photomultiplier tube (PMT) in the detector and searches for a statistical excess over the noise of all PMTs. We show that HAWC has a realistic opportunity to observe the high-energy power law components of GRBs that extend at least up to 30 GeV, as it has been observed by Fermi LAT. The two DAQ systems have an energy threshold that is low enough to observe events similar to GRB 090510 and GRB 090902b with the characteristics observed by Fermi LAT. HAWC will provide information about the high-energy spectra of GRBs which in turn could help to understanding about e-pair attenuation in GRB jets, extragalactic background light absorption, as well as establishing the highest energy to which GRBs accelerate particles.
![Research paper thumbnail of Erratum: Muons in air showers at the Pierre Auger Observatory: Measurement of atmospheric production depth [Phys. Rev. D 90 , 012012 (2014)]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/51510681/thumbnails/1.jpg)
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Physical review letters, Jan 23, 1989
Analysis of the cumulative Fly's Eye data reveals an excess of air showers from the direction of ... more Analysis of the cumulative Fly's Eye data reveals an excess of air showers from the direction of Cygnus X-3 at energies above 0.5 x 10 18 eV. No point source has previously been identified at such high energies. The probability of this excess arising as a chance clustering of isotropic cosmic rays is 6.5 x 10 -4 . The inferred signal flux is (2.0 ± 0.6) x 10 -17 particles/cm 2 s. The Cygnus X-3 4.8-h periodicity is weakly present in the data. PACS numbers: 98.60.Ce, 95.85.Qx, 97.80.Jp
Physical review D: Particles and fields, Jan 15, 1992
... Ong, and L. J Rosenberg Enrico Fermi Institute and Department of Physics, University of Chica... more ... Ong, and L. J Rosenberg Enrico Fermi Institute and Department of Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637 KD Green, J. Matthews, D. Nitz ... 4. Each chance probability is converted to a significance, and the distribution of significances for all trials is shown 4 in Fig. ...
The Astrophysical Journal, 1998
Braz.J.Phys., 2014
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Sociedade Brasileir... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Sociedade Brasileira de Física. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
Journal of Instrumentation, 2011
CITATIONS 0 READS 95 440 authors, including:
Journal of Instrumentation, 2012
The Pierre Auger Observatory is a facility built to detect air showers produced by cosmic rays ab... more The Pierre Auger Observatory is a facility built to detect air showers produced by cosmic rays above 10 17 eV. During clear nights with a low illuminated moon fraction, the UV fluorescence light produced by air showers is recorded by optical telescopes at the Observatory. To correct the observations for variations in atmospheric conditions, atmospheric monitoring is performed at regular intervals ranging from several minutes (for cloud identification) to several hours (for aerosol conditions) to several days (for vertical profiles of temperature, pressure, and humidity). In 2009, the monitoring program was upgraded to allow for additional targeted measurements of atmospheric conditions shortly after the detection of air showers of special interest, e. g., showers produced by very high-energy cosmic rays or showers with atypical longitudinal profiles. The former events are of particular importance for the determination of the energy scale of the Observatory, and the latter are characteristic of unusual air shower physics or exotic primary particle types. The purpose of targeted (or "rapid") monitoring is to improve the resolution of the atmospheric measurements for such events. In this paper, we report on the implementation of the rapid monitoring program and its current status. The rapid monitoring data have been analyzed and applied to the reconstruction of air showers of high interest, and indicate that the air fluorescence measurements affected by clouds and aerosols are effectively corrected using measurements from the regular atmospheric monitoring program. We find that the rapid monitoring program has potential for supporting dedicated physics analyses beyond the standard event reconstruction.
The Astrophysical Journal, 2014
Spherical harmonic moments are well-suited for capturing anisotropy at any scale in the flux of c... more Spherical harmonic moments are well-suited for capturing anisotropy at any scale in the flux of cosmic rays. An unambiguous measurement of the full set of spherical harmonic coefficients requires full-sky coverage. This can be achieved by combining data from observatories located in both the northern and southern hemispheres. To this end, a joint analysis using data recorded at the Telescope Array and the Pierre Auger Observatory above 10 19 eV is presented in this work. The resulting multipolar expansion of the flux of cosmic rays allows us to perform a series of anisotropy searches, and in particular to report on the angular power spectrum of cosmic rays above 10 19 eV. No significant deviation from isotropic expectations is found throughout the analyses performed. Upper limits on the amplitudes of the dipole and quadrupole moments are derived as a function of the direction in the sky, varying between 7% and 13% for the dipole and between 7% and 10% for a symmetric quadrupole.
The Astrophysical Journal, 2014
ABSTRACT
Atmospheric Research, 2014
Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, 2011
The advent of the Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) necessitates the development of a powerful... more The advent of the Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) necessitates the development of a powerful framework for the analysis of radio measurements of cosmic ray air showers. As AERA performs "radio-hybrid" measurements of air shower radio emission in coincidence with the surface particle detectors and fluorescence telescopes of the Pierre Auger Observatory, the radio analysis functionality had to be incorporated in the existing hybrid analysis solutions for fluoresence and surface detector data. This goal has been achieved in a natural way by extending the existing Auger Offline software framework with radio functionality. In this article, we lay out the design, highlights and features of the radio extension implemented in the Auger Offline framework. Its functionality has achieved a high degree of sophistication and offers advanced features such as vectorial reconstruction of the electric field, advanced signal processing algorithms, a transparent and efficient handling of FFTs, a very detailed simulation of detector effects, and the read-in of multiple data formats including data from various radio simulation codes. The source code of this radio functionality can be made available to interested parties on request.
Technical reports on operations and features of the Pierre Auger Observatory, including ongoing a... more Technical reports on operations and features of the Pierre Auger Observatory, including ongoing and planned enhancements and the status of the future northern hemisphere portion of the Observatory. Contributions to the 31st International Cosmic Ray Conference, Lodz, Poland, July 2009.
Journal of Instrumentation
The atmospheric depth of the air shower maximum X max is an observable commonly used for the dete... more The atmospheric depth of the air shower maximum X max is an observable commonly used for the determination of the nuclear mass composition of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. Direct measurements of X max are performed using observations of the longitudinal shower development with fluorescence telescopes. At the same time, several methods have been proposed for an indirect estimation of X max from the characteristics of the shower particles registered with surface detector arrays. In this paper, we present a deep neural network (DNN) for the estimation of X max. The reconstruction relies on the signals induced by shower particles in the ground based water-Cherenkov detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory. The network architecture features recurrent long short-term memory layers to process the temporal structure of signals and hexagonal convolutions to exploit the symmetry of the surface detector array. We evaluate the performance of the network using air showers simulated with three ...
Astroparticle Physics, 2012
We present the sensitivity of HAWC to Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). HAWC is a very high-energy gammara... more We present the sensitivity of HAWC to Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). HAWC is a very high-energy gammaray observatory currently under construction in Mexico at an altitude of 4100 m. It will observe atmospheric air showers via the water Cherenkov method. HAWC will consist of 300 large water tanks instrumented with 4 photomultipliers each. HAWC has two data acquisition (DAQ) systems. The main DAQ system reads out coincident signals in the tanks and reconstructs the direction and energy of individual atmospheric showers. The scaler DAQ counts the hits in each photomultiplier tube (PMT) in the detector and searches for a statistical excess over the noise of all PMTs. We show that HAWC has a realistic opportunity to observe the high-energy power law components of GRBs that extend at least up to 30 GeV, as it has been observed by Fermi LAT. The two DAQ systems have an energy threshold that is low enough to observe events similar to GRB 090510 and GRB 090902b with the characteristics observed by Fermi LAT. HAWC will provide information about the high-energy spectra of GRBs which in turn could help to understanding about e-pair attenuation in GRB jets, extragalactic background light absorption, as well as establishing the highest energy to which GRBs accelerate particles.
Physical review letters, Jan 23, 1989
Analysis of the cumulative Fly's Eye data reveals an excess of air showers from the direction of ... more Analysis of the cumulative Fly's Eye data reveals an excess of air showers from the direction of Cygnus X-3 at energies above 0.5 x 10 18 eV. No point source has previously been identified at such high energies. The probability of this excess arising as a chance clustering of isotropic cosmic rays is 6.5 x 10 -4 . The inferred signal flux is (2.0 ± 0.6) x 10 -17 particles/cm 2 s. The Cygnus X-3 4.8-h periodicity is weakly present in the data. PACS numbers: 98.60.Ce, 95.85.Qx, 97.80.Jp
Physical review D: Particles and fields, Jan 15, 1992
... Ong, and L. J Rosenberg Enrico Fermi Institute and Department of Physics, University of Chica... more ... Ong, and L. J Rosenberg Enrico Fermi Institute and Department of Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637 KD Green, J. Matthews, D. Nitz ... 4. Each chance probability is converted to a significance, and the distribution of significances for all trials is shown 4 in Fig. ...
The Astrophysical Journal, 1998
Braz.J.Phys., 2014
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Sociedade Brasileir... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Sociedade Brasileira de Física. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
Journal of Instrumentation, 2011
CITATIONS 0 READS 95 440 authors, including:
Journal of Instrumentation, 2012
The Pierre Auger Observatory is a facility built to detect air showers produced by cosmic rays ab... more The Pierre Auger Observatory is a facility built to detect air showers produced by cosmic rays above 10 17 eV. During clear nights with a low illuminated moon fraction, the UV fluorescence light produced by air showers is recorded by optical telescopes at the Observatory. To correct the observations for variations in atmospheric conditions, atmospheric monitoring is performed at regular intervals ranging from several minutes (for cloud identification) to several hours (for aerosol conditions) to several days (for vertical profiles of temperature, pressure, and humidity). In 2009, the monitoring program was upgraded to allow for additional targeted measurements of atmospheric conditions shortly after the detection of air showers of special interest, e. g., showers produced by very high-energy cosmic rays or showers with atypical longitudinal profiles. The former events are of particular importance for the determination of the energy scale of the Observatory, and the latter are characteristic of unusual air shower physics or exotic primary particle types. The purpose of targeted (or "rapid") monitoring is to improve the resolution of the atmospheric measurements for such events. In this paper, we report on the implementation of the rapid monitoring program and its current status. The rapid monitoring data have been analyzed and applied to the reconstruction of air showers of high interest, and indicate that the air fluorescence measurements affected by clouds and aerosols are effectively corrected using measurements from the regular atmospheric monitoring program. We find that the rapid monitoring program has potential for supporting dedicated physics analyses beyond the standard event reconstruction.
The Astrophysical Journal, 2014
Spherical harmonic moments are well-suited for capturing anisotropy at any scale in the flux of c... more Spherical harmonic moments are well-suited for capturing anisotropy at any scale in the flux of cosmic rays. An unambiguous measurement of the full set of spherical harmonic coefficients requires full-sky coverage. This can be achieved by combining data from observatories located in both the northern and southern hemispheres. To this end, a joint analysis using data recorded at the Telescope Array and the Pierre Auger Observatory above 10 19 eV is presented in this work. The resulting multipolar expansion of the flux of cosmic rays allows us to perform a series of anisotropy searches, and in particular to report on the angular power spectrum of cosmic rays above 10 19 eV. No significant deviation from isotropic expectations is found throughout the analyses performed. Upper limits on the amplitudes of the dipole and quadrupole moments are derived as a function of the direction in the sky, varying between 7% and 13% for the dipole and between 7% and 10% for a symmetric quadrupole.
The Astrophysical Journal, 2014
ABSTRACT
Atmospheric Research, 2014
Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, 2011
The advent of the Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) necessitates the development of a powerful... more The advent of the Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) necessitates the development of a powerful framework for the analysis of radio measurements of cosmic ray air showers. As AERA performs "radio-hybrid" measurements of air shower radio emission in coincidence with the surface particle detectors and fluorescence telescopes of the Pierre Auger Observatory, the radio analysis functionality had to be incorporated in the existing hybrid analysis solutions for fluoresence and surface detector data. This goal has been achieved in a natural way by extending the existing Auger Offline software framework with radio functionality. In this article, we lay out the design, highlights and features of the radio extension implemented in the Auger Offline framework. Its functionality has achieved a high degree of sophistication and offers advanced features such as vectorial reconstruction of the electric field, advanced signal processing algorithms, a transparent and efficient handling of FFTs, a very detailed simulation of detector effects, and the read-in of multiple data formats including data from various radio simulation codes. The source code of this radio functionality can be made available to interested parties on request.