Abstract
The Carpet air shower array of the Baksan Neutrino Observatory is in operation for a long time, and it was modernized more than once. A short review of important results obtained with this array is given, as well as future prospects, since at the moment the new project called Carpet-3 is in progress, using the old array as its basis. The purpose of the new project is to substantially increase the muon detector area (quite soon up to 400 m2 and later up to 600 m2). This improvement will allow one to reach a very good sensitivity to diffuse cosmic photons by selecting muon-poor showers. The energy range where the new experiment will be competitive with other experiments of gamma-ray astronomy is near and below 100 TeV.
Highlights
The Carpet air shower array [1, 2], sometimes called BASA (Baksan Air Shower Array) was the first large facility of the Baksan Neutrino Observatory (Fig. 1)
A carpet of 400 scintillators with a total area of 200 m2 represented the model of a single plane of the future Baksan Underground Scintillation Telescope (BUST), under construction
In spite of such an applied purpose of its creation, the Carpet array appeared to be an instrument for cosmic ray studies with enormous significance of its own
Summary
The Carpet air shower array [1, 2], sometimes called BASA (Baksan Air Shower Array) was the first large facility of the Baksan Neutrino Observatory (Fig. 1). At the moment the new project Carpet-3 is under realization on its basis: it was demonstrated that with a radical increase of the muon detector area, due to selection of muon-poor showers, the array can have the world-best sensitivity to primary cosmic gamma rays with energies in the range 10-100 TeV [3]. In view of this future development of the array, it is worthwhile to review the most interesting previous results obtained during its long history. Some of them are very far from typical cosmic ray physics made with air shower arrays
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