Speaker
Dr
Segev BenZvi
(University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Description
To measure the per-mille anisotropy in the TeV cosmic rays with a
ground-based experiment, it is necessary to estimate the exposure of the
detector to cosmic ray air showers. The estimate must account for drifts
that occur in the detector during the course of the measurement, as well
as changes in the shower signal at ground level caused by atmospheric
conditions. Due to the difficulty of the exposure calculation, all
experiments follow a similar procedure in which the exposure is calculated
in small time steps using real events. Using this method, the exposure
can be estimated with sufficient accuracy to measure per-mille effects in
the data. However, calculating the exposure using the data themselves
also introduces significant and surprising artifacts into the resulting
sky maps. Using simulated events, we will demonstrate the difficulty of
interpreting the cosmic ray anisotropy in light of these artifacts.
