Scientific infrastructures and explore for high energy cosmic ray origins

Abstract

Scientific infrastructures are the backbone of the innovation for the whole world. It is also true for China as a country and for cosmic ray as a reasearch branch. In its history of 100 years, the traditional cosmic ray research does not totally mega project rely on. Since 80s of last century, the detection of cosmic neutrino and ultra high energy cosmic rays set the new standard for the old field because the necessarity of huge active volume of the neutrino detector and the effective area of more than 1000 km2. The new mega projects are proposed and built in the last decades and have been playing central roles for the tramendous successes in cosmic ray research, particularly for the Very High Energy (VHE) gamma ray astronomy. China has been making significant efforts in survey for VHE gamma ray sources by developing the extensive air shower techniques in last two decades. After the successful operation of the two major international high altitude observatories, ASg and ARGO-YBJ, we propose the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), as a complex array of many type of detectors deployed over one square kilometers, to challenge one of the unsolved problems in the new century, i.e, the origin of the high energy cosmic rays. With the highest sensitivity at the energy above 30 TeV, LHAASO will be one of the pillards for the cosmic ray research.