![]() With the negligible amount of antimatter that exists in our universe, "it's almost impossible to make anything bigger than a proton," says AMS Deputy Principal Investigator Mike Capell of MIT. One clue that this is the case would be finding an antimatter nucleus in the wild. But an alternative idea is that a large amount of antimatter is still out there it just hasn't had a chance to collide with our matter-filled universe. The generally accepted theory is that this imbalance came about thanks to processes in the very young universe that favor matter over antimatter. But those evenly matched partners would have annihilated one another, and we would not exist. Together they spelled out the persistent message of the AMS experiment: We have a lot left to learn from cosmic rays.įor one, cosmic rays could tell us about the imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe.īecause matter and antimatter particles are created in pairs, scientists think the Big Bang should have produced half of each. Ting, a Nobel Laureate and Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shared a mix of new and recent results during his talk. Since its installation, AMS has collected data from more than 90 billion cosmic ray events, experiment lead Sam Ting reported today in a colloquium at the experiment's headquarters, CERN European research center. Nature, 2016 531 (7592): 70 DOI: 10.AMS was designed to detect cosmic rays, highly energetic particles and nuclei that bombard the Earth from space. A large light-mass component of cosmic rays at 1017–1017.5 electronvolts from radio observations. CORSIKA was launched in 1989 and has been cited by nearly 700 peer-reviewed scientific publications of air shower experiments worldwide. Within the framework of the Pierre Auger Observatory, an international astrophysical large-scale experiment in Argentina with major contributions by KIT and other German universities, CORSIKA is being further developed and continuously complemented with new interaction models. #Nasa bbc news cosmic rays 2016 codeThis simulation code is implanted in the CORSIKA code (Cosmic Ray Simulation for KASCADE) that was used in particular for KIT's KASCADE-Grande particle detector experiment and the LOPES radio prototype experiment operated until 2013. "The Xmax value, hence, indicates particle composition."ĬoREAS is the result of ten years of development work at KIT. "Light particles penetrate deeper than heavy ones," Huege explains. It can be determined reliably and continuously by simulations only. For the precise determination of the mass, the depth of penetration of the air showers into the Earth's atmosphere, briefly called Xmax, is needed. Several hundred LOFAR antennas in Exloo, the Netherlands, measure the arrival direction, energy, and mass of the particles. "CoREAS is used by astroparticle physicists worldwide to interpret radio emissions from air showers." Up to 100 simulations may be required to exactly classify a signal. "With this code, we evaluate the measurements of the radio antennas and interpret the signals precisely," Huege explains. Such research would not be possible without the simulation code CoREAS (CORSIKA-based Radio Emission from Air Showers) developed at KIT. Recent analysis of the LOFAR data has now opened up a new perspective on this question. Yet, it is still unknown in which energy ranges this transition takes place. Experts already know that particle flux from galactic sources stops somewhere and cosmic rays of highest energies can be produced in the most energetic extragalactic sources only. This might suggest that the light particles detected now are of extragalactic origin or - the more exciting option - that a particularly energy-rich source exists in our galaxy. In this relatively high energy range, preferably heavy particles have been found so far, which may arise from supernova remnants. "This gives rise to questions," Huege says. Recent results found a surprisingly high number of light particles, protons and helium nuclei, at energies of 10 to the power of 17 to 10 to the power of 17,5 electron volts. "After ten years of research, we now understand the radio signals of these particle cascades so well that we can draw conclusions with respect to the properties of the primary particles using detailed measurements and their comparison to our simulation code," Tim Huege of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of KIT reports. ![]()
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