Status of the AugerPrime upgrade of the Pierre Auger Observatory

Institute of Nuclear Physics PAN, Krakow, Poland

^a e-mail: niraj.dhital@ifj.edu.pl
^b Av. San Martín Norte 304 (5613) Malargüe, Prov. de Mendoza, Argentina
^c Full author list and acknowledgments at: http://auger.org/archive/authors_2018_09.html

Published online: 13 May 2019

Abstract

The Pierre Auger Observatory has been very successful in determining many aspects of the highest-energy cosmic rays including, among others, the flux suppression at energies above 4 × 10¹⁹ eV, stringent upper limits on photon and neutrino fluxes at ultra-high energies and an unexpected evolution of the mass composition with energy. We expect an extension of the frontiers of our knowledge on these aspects from a major upgrade of the Observatory. The upgrade, known as AugerPrime, will include an addition of a 4 m² Surface Scintillator Detector atop each water-Cherenkov station of the Surface array. The new detectors will provide us with an unprecedented opportunity to perform a complementary measurement of the shower particles and thus determine the primary mass composition with good accuracy on an event-by-event basis. AugerPrime will also include an upgrade of electronics, installation of the AMIGA Underground Muon Detector and a change of observation mode of the Fluorescence Detector, which will increase its current duty cycle by about 50%. Current status of the upgrade with the main focus on the Surface Scintillator Detectors will be presented, following a brief description of the physics motivation for the upgrade.