South Pole Air Shower Experiment - 2

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Abstract 9615101 Gaisser The South Pole Air Shower Experiment (SPASE) consists of a sparsely filled array of scintillation detectors covering several thousand square meters at South Pole. It detects energetic charged particles (mostly electrons) which are produced in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays. The experiment has several goals, the most important of which is to determine the elemental composition of the primary cosmic rays at energies above approximately 100 TeV. In order to do this SPASE works in coincidence with the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA), which has several hundred optical detectors so deep in the ice sheet that the only products of the cosmic ray interactions which can be seen by AMANDA are muons. The ratio of muons to electrons produced in a cosmic ray shower is a sensitive function of the mass of the original primary cosmic ray. Since SPASE can measure the number of electrons produced by a cosmic ray as well as its total energy, and AMANDA can determine the number of muons, the mass of an incident primary cosmic ray can be determined. The determination of the elemental composition of cosmic rays is one of the most important outstanding questions in cosmic ray physics and such information will shed light on the origin of energetic cosmic rays. This project is cooperative with the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. ***