KASCADE-Grande measurements of energy spectra for elemental groups of cosmic rays

Understand

The KASCADE-Grande experiment, located at KIT-Karlsruhe, Germany, consists of a large scintillator array for measurements of charged particles, N_ch, and of an array of shielded scintillation counters used for muon counting, N_mu.

• KASCADE-Grande is optimized for cosmic ray measurements in the energy range 10 PeV to 1000 PeV, thereby enabling the verification of a knee in the iron spectrum expected at approximately 100 PeV.
• Exploring the composition in this energy range is of fundamental importance for understanding the transition from galactic to extragalactic cosmic rays.
• Following earlier studies of elemental spectra reconstructed in the knee energy range from KASCADE data, we have now extended these measurements to beyond 100 PeV.