Current status of the TAx4 surface detectors

Astrophysical Big Bang Laboratory, RIKEN, Wako, Saitama, Japan

^* Corresponding author: eiji.kido@riken.jp
^** Corresponding author: Full author list http://www.telescopearray.org/research/collaborators

Published online: 28 April 2023

Abstract

Telescope Array (TA) is the largest ultrahigh-energy cosmic-ray (UHECR) observatory in the northern hemisphere. It explores the origin of UHECRs using a surface detector (SD) array, covering approximately 700 km², and a fluorescence detector (FD) stations viewing the skies above the array. TA has found evidence for a cluster of cosmic rays with energies greater than 57 EeV known as a HotSpot. Recently, TA has obtained additional evidence for an excess of cosmic rays with energies above 10^19.4 eV and also found implications of spectrum anisotropy. An expanded SD array and FD stations called TAx4 experiment was designed to increase the data collection rate at the highest energies to confirm the anisotropies with more data. We have constructed and deployed more than half of the SDs for the TAx4 experiment and began stable data taking operations. We present TAx4 SD’s current status.