Looking for long-range correlations among the EEE telescopes

Abstract

The search for long-range correlations among air showers is one of the main goal of the Extreme Energy Events (EEE) Project. The existence of such events has only been supposed theoretically through several physical mechanisms, the most convincing being the so-called GZ effect, based on the photodisintegration of a heavy primary nucleus in the solar field. Even with a large detector coverage, current rate expectations are of few events per year. To measure time correlations among distant air showers, sparse arrays of detection stations spread over large areas are needed. A very limited number of experimental setups can perform this measurement and few experimental results have been reported over the past years. Started in 2004 the EEE project is a network of about 60 cosmic muons tracking telescopes made by 3 wide area Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPCs), sensitive to the direction of incident charged cosmic particles. The telescopes are distributed over the whole Italian territory, thus making the EEE array an ideal tool for the detection of long-range time correlations among extensive air showers. In this paper we will describe the analysis strategies adopted to search for such rare correlation events, together with the results obtained analysing the full statistics collected by the EEE telescopes.