Detection of Cosmic Rays from ground: An Introduction

Abstract

Cosmic rays are the most outstanding example of accelerated particles. They are about 1% of the total mass of the Universe, so that cosmic rays would represent by far the most important energy transformation process of the Universe. Despite large progresses in building new detectors and in the analysis techniques, the key questions concerning origin, acceleration and propagation of the radiation are still open. One of the reasons is that there are significant discrepancies among the different results obtained by experiments located at ground probably due to unknown systematic errors affecting the measurements. In this note we will focus on detection of Galactic CRs from ground with EAS arrays. This is not a place for a complete review of CR physics (for which we recommend, for instance [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]) but only to provide elements useful to understand the basic techniques used in reconstructing primary particle characteristics (energy, mass and arrival direction) from ground, and to show why indirect measurements are difficult and results still conflicting.