Summary of the main results of the KASCADE and KASCADE-Grande experiments

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy
² Institut für Kernphysik, KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
³ Universidad Michoacana, Inst. Física y Matemáticas, Morelia, Mexico
⁴ Institut für Experimentelle Kernphysik, KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
⁵ Horia Hulubei National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering, Bucharest, Romania
⁶ Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, INAF Torino, Italy
⁷ Universidade São Paulo, Instituto de Física de São Carlos, Brasil
⁸ Fachbereich Physik, Universität Wuppertal, Germany
⁹ Department of Physics, Siegen University, Germany
¹⁰ Dept. of Astrophysics, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
¹¹ National Centre for Nuclear Research, Department of Astrophysics, Lodz, Poland
¹² Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS), Frankfurt am Main, Germany
¹³ Department of Physics, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

^* e-mail: andrea.chiavassa@to.infn.it

Published online: 10 May 2019

Abstract

The KASCADE and KASCADE-Grande experiments operated in KIT-Campus North, Karlsruhe (Germany) from 1993 to 2012. The two experiments studied primary cosmic rays in the energy range from 10¹⁴ eV to 10¹⁸ eV, investigating the change of slope of the spectrum detected at 2 - 4 × 10¹⁵ eV, the so called knee. We briefly review the performance of the experiments and then the main results obtained in the operation of both experiments: the test of hadronic interaction models, the all particle primary spectrum, the elemental composition of primary cosmic rays (with the first claim of a knee-like feature of the heavy primaries spectrum) and the search for large scale anisotropies.