Celebrating 15 years of achievements and signature ceremony of a new International Agreement for the next 10 years
During November 14-17, 2015, the Pierre Auger Collaboration celebrates the inauguration of AugerPrime. Spread over an area of 3000 km2 in the 'yellow pampa' in western Argentina, Auger is the largest cosmic ray experiment in the world. AugerPrime allows the Czech researchers to contribute to discerning the mysteries of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays until 2025.
The Pierre Auger Observatory is the world’s leading science project for the exploration of
cosmic rays. The Observatory has achieved excellent results helping scientists to better understand
particles with energies more than million times larger than the beam energy at the current world
largest accelerator. The Observatory has collected unprecedented statistics of these mysterious
events. It has established the most precise energy spectrum and has published a catalogue of
incoming directions of the most energetic events. It has also addressed the chemical composition of
the primary cosmic particles and many more questions. In fact the Observatory has opened a new
window to the Universe and thanks to that it is now able to ask more detailed questions about the
origin of these elusive particles. More than 500 scientists from 16 countries are working together
since 1998 in the Province of Mendoza, Argentina, to better understand the origin and properties of
the most energetic particles from the distant Universe.
Since 1999, the Czech Republic is a full Auger member state, represented at the institutional
level by the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Palacky University in
Olomouc and the Charles University in Prague. The Czech Republic has played an important role in
the development, construction and operation of the Observatory, when the Czech contribution were
directed namely at the construction, calibration and operation of fluorescence detectors. The Czech
members are now also contributing at the forefront of data analysis and physics interpretation.
The Czech mirrors are installed in more than half of the current fluorescence telescopes. “
Innovations and pure science have met in this project. It is the collaboration of optical experts,
particle physicists and astronomers what makes the Czech participation visible and significant…”
says director of the Institute of Physics, prof. Jan Ridky and continues “… during the years our
participation has been financed by several resources, but it would have been totally impossible
without the support of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic.”
Auger has redefined the term “scientific adventure” and set new standards in multi-national
cooperation and research training. More than 220 young researchers have completed a PhD thesis.
Auger has brought new insights into the origin and nature of cosmic rays, e.g. the particles seem
to be surprisingly heavy, which makes “particle astronomy” difficult. We cannot tell yet whether
the intensity drop at energy of ten million TeV is due to interactions with cosmic microwave
background or whether it is a feature of the so-called cosmic accelerators. How can they attain
energies far beyond the 7 TeV of the LHC? These and other upcoming challenges will be addressed in
a second decade of data collection with an upgraded detector system called
AugerPrime.
The AugerPrime upgrade will consist of enhanced surface scintillation detector stations
deployed over the full 3000 km2 area, faster electronics, dedicated underground muon detectors and
optimized fluorescence telescopes. Ten more years of operation is planned to double the data set
and to particularly study the origin of the flux suppression at ultra-high energy, the proton
contribution at highest energies beyond 1019 eV and new particle physics beyond the reach of the
LHC.
Additional info:
Factsheet for the Pierre Auger Observatory and flyer about AugerPrime Symposium
https://www.auger.org/index.php/observatory/augerprime
16. 11. 2015
