Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-1-2025

Department

Department of Physics

Abstract

Data collected so far by the Pierre Auger Observatory have enabled major advances in ultrahigh energy cosmic ray physics and demonstrated that improved determination of masses of primary cosmic-ray particles, preferably on an event-by-event basis, is necessary for understanding their origin and nature. Improvement in primary mass measurements was the main motivation for the upgrade of the Pierre Auger Observatory, called AugerPrime. As part of this upgrade, scintillator detectors are added to the existing water-Cherenkov surface detector stations. By making use of the differences in detector response to the electromagnetic particles and muons between scintillator and water-Cherenkov detectors, the electromagnetic and muonic components of cosmic-ray air showers can be disentangled. Since the muonic component is sensitive to the primary mass, such combination of detectors provides a powerful way to improve primary mass composition measurements over the original Auger surface detector design. In this paper, the so-called Scintillator Surface Detectors are discussed, including their design characteristics, production process, testing procedure and deployment in the field.

Publisher's Statement

© 2025 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd on behalf of Sissa Medialab. Publisher’s version of record:https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-0221/20/08/P08002

Publication Title

Journal of Instrumentation

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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