KASCADE
Physics experiment to study cosmic rays
KASCADE was a European physics experiment started in 1996 at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany (now Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), an extensive air shower experiment array to study the cosmic ray primary composition and the hadronic interactions, measuring simultaneously the electronic, muonic and hadronic components.
KASCADE-Grande was a further extension of the previous project by reassembling 37 detectors of the former EAS-TOP experiment running between 1987 and 2000 at Campo Imperatore, Gran Sasso Laboratories, Italy. By this Grande extension of KASCADE the energy range was extended to 1014, 1018 eV.
The experiment contributed significantly to the development of the CORSIKA simulation program which is use heavily in astroparticle physics. Co-located with KASCADE-Grande is the LOPES experiment. LOPES consists of radio antennas and measures the radio emission of extensive air showers.
KASCADE (including all extensions) stopped operation in 2013, but a part of the detectors is still used in other experiments for cosmic-ray air showers, e.g., LOFAR or Tunka.
The data acquired by KASCADE-Grande has meanwhile been made accessible to the public in the KASCADE Cosmic-Ray Data Center (KCDC).
01Results
KASCADE studied heavier components of cosmic rays, finding a "knee" near 80 PeV in 2011, and extending the spectrum measurements to 200PeV.
Later, a knee-like feature in the heavy component and an ankle-like feature in the light component of cosmic rays was discovered at an energy of about 1017 eV.
02Participants
- Institut für Kernphysik and Institut für Experimentelle Kernphysik, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
- Dipartimento di Fisica Generale dell' Università and Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario, National Institute for Astrophysics, Turin, Italy
- University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany
- University of Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany
- Soltan Institute for Nuclear Studies, Łódź, Poland
- Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering, Bucharest, Romania
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “KASCADE”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Crshower2 nasa.jpg by Simon Swordy, Public domain
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