Extreme energy events project: Construction of the detectors

Abstract

The Extreme Energy Events (EEE) experiment is a strategic project of Centro Fermi dedicated to the study of extreme energy cosmic rays with an innovative outreach approach: High school students are directly involved in the experiment and play a primary role. EEE exploits a network of muon tracking telescopes constituted by three large area MRPCs. In this work we describe the detector design and the construction phase which is performed at CERN by high school students and teachers. The experiment is coordinated by Centro Fermi with collaboration from INFN, CERN, Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MIUR). Nowadays 52 telescopes are installed all over Italy (3 105 km2) and a total of 100 institutes participate monitoring the quality of the data and analysing them. The EEE Project is still expanding to enlarge the network, involving more schools.