Abstract
AMIGA (Auger Muons and Infill for the Ground Array) is an upgrade of the Pierre Auger Observatory to complement the study of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECR) by measuring the muon content of extensive air showers (EAS). It consists of an array of 61 water Cherenkov detectors on a denser spacing in combination with underground scintillation detectors used for muon density measurement. Each detector is composed of three scintillation modules, with 10 m2 detection area per module, buried at 2.3 m depth, resulting in a total detection area of 30 m2. Silicon photomultiplier sensors (SiPM) measure the amount of scintillation light generated by charged particles traversing the modules. In this paper, the design of the front-end electronics to process the signals of those SiPMs and test results from the laboratory and from the Pierre Auger Observatory are described. Compared to our previous prototype, the new electronics shows a higher performance, higher efficiency and lower power consumption, and it has a new acquisition system with increased dynamic range that allows measurements closer to the shower core. The new acquisition system is based on the measurement of the total charge signal that the muonic component of the cosmic ray shower generates in the detector.
Highlights
The Pierre Auger Observatory [1] is located in the North of the city of Malargüe, province of Mendoza, Argentina and covers an area of about 3000 km2
The silicon photomultipliers (SiPM) readout is realized by CITIROC ASICs [14], special 32-channel integrated circuit designed for the readout of SiPMs [12]
For the determination of the muon density it is essential that the high gain channel (HG) and low gain channel (LG) outputs are linear within their full dynamic ranges
Summary
The Pierre Auger Observatory [1] is located in the North of the city of Malargüe, province of Mendoza, Argentina and covers an area of about 3000 km. It is designed to detect ultra-high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) showers with a hybrid detection technique. It consists of 1660 water Cherenkov detectors (WCD) [2] arranged on a triangular grid with a distance of ∼1.5 km between stations, conforming the surface detector (SD). The two main objectives of AMIGA are the measurement of composition-sensitive observables of extensive air showers (EAS) and the study of features of hadronic interactions That these goals can be achieved with a muon detection techniques was proven by several experiments like KASCADE [9] and KASCADEGrande [10] with big impact on cosmic ray physics.
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