HAWC measurements on the total energy spectrum of cosmic rays
J.A. Morales-Soto*,
J.C. Arteaga-Velázquez on behalf of the HAWC Collaboration*: corresponding author
Pre-published on:
July 25, 2023
Published on:
September 27, 2024
Abstract
To fully comprehend the nature of the propagation and acceleration mechanisms of TeV cosmic rays it is essential to study their energy spectrum with great precision and high statistics. To this matter a new generation of cosmic-ray experiments, like the HAWC observatory, has been built to enable unprecedented measurements of the cosmic-ray spectrum at TeV energies. In this work, we present a measurement of the total energy spectrum of cosmic rays from 10 TeV up to 1 PeV using HAWC. The events were collected from January 2017 to December 2020. CORSIKA/QGSJET-II-04 simulations were employed to estimate the energy of the cosmic-ray primaries. In this study we applied the Bayes' unfolding method on the measured air-shower energy distribution of the data in order to obtain the all-particle cosmic-ray energy spectrum. We found that the spectrum shows a break at $(28.1^{+1.3}_{-1.2})$ (stat) TeV with a statistical significance of at least 4.2 $\sigma$. At this energy the spectral index changes from $\alpha_1$ = -2.41 $\pm$ 0.01 (stat) to $\alpha_2$ = -2.73 $\pm$ 0.01 (stat). Our result is consistent with previous reports about the presence of a spectral break.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.444.0364
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