A Measurement Of The All-particle Energy Spectrum Of Cosmic Rays From 1013 To 1015eV Using HAWC

Abstract

We report the total energy spectrum of cosmic rays in the energy interval from 10TeV to 1PeV, which lies in the energy region where both direct and indirect cosmic ray experiments overlap. The all-particle spectrum was obtained from an unfolding analysis of 5.3 years of data collected with the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory for zenith angles smaller than or equal to 35°. The study was carried out in the framework of the QGSJET-II-04 hadronic interaction model. The measured spectrum confirms the presence of a knee-like feature at tens of TeV. In our analysis, the position of this softening is found at 40.2±1.0(stat.)−6.4+6.2(sys.)TeV. The measured spectral indices before and after the break are γ1=−2.53±0.01(stat.)−0.05+0.04(sys.) and γ2=−2.71±0.01(stat.)−0.04+0.03(sys.), respectively.

Department(s)

Physics

Comments

National Science Foundation, Grant 180385

Keywords and Phrases

Cosmic-ray energy spectrum; Extensive air showers; Ground-based cosmic-ray detectors; HAWC; High-energy cosmic rays; Water Cherenkov detectors

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

0927-6505

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2025 Elsevier, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 May 2025

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