TY  - THES
AB  - The determination of the composition of cosmic rays at ultra-high energies is still a challenge in astroparticle physics. Beside of the determination of the overall composition the knowledge of the general existence of single elements, specifically protons, is sufficient for certain analyses. This work presents a method which is able to reject the helium origin of single very deep air shower events. Utilizing a parametrized distribution of shower maxima, predicted by different hadronic interaction models and CONEX, it is possible to determine a probability value of a helium nucleus to induce an air shower with the observed depth of shower maximum or deeper. If this derived probability value is small enough, the hypothesis of a helium primary can be rejected. Since heavier primaries than helium tend to produce air showers with lower depths than Helium, which leads to smaller probabilities for deep events, these possible primaries can be excluded as well. After the development of the method, a check of the method’s performance is presented and a first application to the data of the Pierre Auger Observatory is performed. The result shows that this method might be able to exclude the helium origin hypothesis with good significance.
AU  - Heimann, Philipp
DA  - 2018
KW  - Kosmische Strahlung
KW  - Gumbelverteilung
KW  - Cosmic rays
KW  - Protons
KW  - Lorentz invariance
KW  - Gumbel distribution
LA  - eng
PY  - 2018
TI  - A test for the existence of protons in ultra-high energy cosmic rays
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hbz:467-13935
Y2  - 2024-12-26T21:21:51
ER  -