Mass composition sensitivity of combined arrays of water cherenkov and scintillation detectors in the EeV range

摘要

We consider an array of scintillation detectors combined with an array of water Cherenkov detectors designed to simultaneously measure the cosmic-ray primary mass composition and energy spectrum at energies around 1EeV. In this work we investigate the sensitivity to primary mass composition of such combined arrays. The water Cherenkov detectors are arranged in a triangular grid with fixed 750m spacing and the configuration of the scintillation detectors is changed to study the impact of different configurations on the sensitivity to mass composition. We show that the performance for composition determination can be compared favorably to that of fluorescence measurements after the difference in duty cycles is considered. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.