WISRD Research & Engineering Journal

Image of cosmic ray showers – Bing images Previous work by Clancy W. James (On the Nature of Radio-Wave Radiation from Particle Cascades, 2022), suggests these high-energy particles sometimes trigger radio waves, believed to be from Cherenkov 1 or Bremsstrahlung radiation 2 . To study this, WISRD’s cosmic ray detector is used in conjunction with its radio telescopes to look for and document radio events coincident with cosmic ray showers that may connect the two events and provide further data in the field of high- energy physics. 3. Cosmic Ray Detection WISRD maintains and operates a Quarknet (Quarknet.com) cosmic ray detector consisting of four scintillators with photomultiplier tubes (PMT’s). The Digital Acquisition Board (DAQ) was designed at FermiLab (see appendix). The first step is to install the counting software “Equip” from FermiLab and calibrate the detector. From theory and experiment we know that the count rate should be about 1 event per square centimeter per minute. When setting up a cosmic ray detector, the first voltage to establish is the threshold voltage of the PMT. This voltage determines a threshold that must be exceeded for counts to be counted as a cosmic ray event capture. Setting the threshold level too high will miss all but those events that correspond to a large amount of energy deposited in the detector; setting the threshold too low will result in background noise within the electronics being mistaken as event counts. The most efficient threshold voltage is determined by increasing the PMT threshold voltage until the count rate change is reduced, i.e., the “kink” in the curve. This kink is at around 300mv (see Fig 2).

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