FACULTADE DE F ISICA Traballo de Fin de Grao

B.Sc. THESIS:

ANALYSIS OF THE SOLAR MODULATION WITH THE RPC WALL OF THE HADES SPECTROMETER AT GSI
Angel Ferran Pousa

Supervised by: Juan Antonio Garz on Heydt

Contents
1 Introduction 2 Some Concerns About the Used Data 3 About Cosmic Rays 3.1 Cosmic Ray modulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Cosmic Rays and the atmosphere. Structure of particle showers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The 4.1 4.2 4.3 4 5 6 7 8

HADES RPC detector 10 Description of the detector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Estimation of the detector eciency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Eect of room Temperature and Pressure on RPC gaseous detectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

5 Cosmic Ray Data Analysis 15 5.1 Determination of the absorption coecients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 5.2 Corrected Fluxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 5.3 Fourier Analysis of the corrected data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 6 Multivariate Analysis 6.1 Introduction and hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Analysis of the dierent cases . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.1 Multiplicity 1 and internal temperature 6.2.2 Multiplicity 1 and external temperature 6.2.3 Multiplicity 2 and internal temperature 6.2.4 Multiplicity 2 and external temperature 6.3 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Final Conclusions and Considerations 22 22 23 23 24 24 24 25 25

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Resumo Neste documento presentase unha an alise dos datos obtidos durante a posta a punto dos detectores RPC (Resistive Plate Chambers) antes de seren incorporados ao espectr ometro HADES do GSI, en Darmstadt (Alema na). Estes datos consisten en medici ons do fondo de raios c osmicos durante catro d as nos cales se intentaron buscar efectos da modulaci on solar. A pesares do corto per odo da toma de datos obtiv eronse evidencias do chamado efecto diurno, as coma outros efectos que requerir an dun estudo m ais detallado. Un obxectivo engadido deste traballo foi o de desenvolver as ferramentas de an alise necesarias para o estudo sistem atico dos raios c osmicos con detectores de RPCs, de alta resoluci on temporal e granularidade, coma os que o LabCAF prev e instalar nos vindeiros meses nesta Facultade. Resumen En este documento se presenta un an alisis de los datos obtenidos durante la puesta a punto de los detectores RPC (Resistive Plate Chambers) antes de ser incorporados al espectr ometro HADES del GSI, en Darmstadt (Alemania). Estos datos consisten en mediciones del fondo de rayos c osmicos durante cuatro d as en los cuales se ha intentado buscar efectos de la modulaci on solar. A pesar del corto periodo de la toma de datos se han observado evidencias del llamado efecto diurno, as como otros efectos que requerir an un estudio m as detallado. Un objetivo a nadido de este trabajo ha sido el desarrollar las herramientas de an alisis necesarias para el estudio sistem atico de los rayos c osmicos con detectores de RPCs, de alta resolucin temporal y granularidad, como los que el LabCAF prev e instalar en los pr oximos meses en esta Facultad. Abstract In this document is presented an analysis of the gathered data during the commissioning of the RPC (Resistive Plate Chambers) detectors before they were incorporated to the HADES spectrometer at GSI, in Darmstadt (Germany). These data consists on measurements of the cosmic ray background during a period of four days, in which the presence of solar modulation eects has been searched and studied. Despite the short period of measurement, evidences of the so-called diurnal eect have been observed, as well as other eects that would require a more detailed analysis. An additional objetive of this paper was to develop the necessary tools to carry out a systematic study of the cosmic rays with RPC detectors, of very high temporal resolution and granularity, like the ones that LabCAF expects to have installed installed in our Faculty by in the coming months.

Introduction

One hundred years after their discovery, cosmic rays are still a permanent source of unknowns. Although we have learnt a lot about their properties and the energy they have, we dont know yet where and how are they produced or how do they reach the huge energies that some of them show when they arrive to the Earth surface. Cosmic Rays, arriving from the Sun and the most distant places of our Universe, represent a continuous ux of information that gives us a picture of what is happening in our surroundings. The correct interpretation of their message can help us to understand more about the place where we are, the processes involved in the creation and modulation of their ux, the properties of our atmosphere and even weather forecasting, among many others. With the aim of studying such properties, the Physics Faculty of the USC is very interested in setting up a couple of RPC detectors to start making its own measurements.The novelty here is that those detectors have never been used for cosmic ray analysis but, in priciple, they represent a potential improvement over the existing ones, mainly because of their high temporal and space resolution at a much lower price point. However, previous to the installation of the RPCs, it is necessary to research about their properies and how do they perform in cosmic ray measurements, and a great opportunity to carry out this was the data gathered during the commissioning of the new RPC wall in the HADES experiment at GSI. About 600 millions of events were recorded during the commissioning of the detector in the last months of 2009,

corresponding to an approximate time of 1560 hours. Nevertheless, only a bit more than 4 days of those data are actually accurate since it was the only stable period of measurement. The present paper modestly continues the job done in [2] and [3], where a deep study of such data and the detectors themselves was performed. The main objective will be to try to visualize and analyze the eect of the solar modulation in the cosmic ray ux, with also a study of the intrinsic eciency of the detectors , where tools of multivariate analysiswill be used. Possitive results would be very encouraging, supporting the use of RPCs for cosmic ray measurement. Before starting with the bulk of the paper, a summary of the data available is included in the following lines.

Some Concerns About the Used Data

As said in the introduction, the available cosmic ray data consists on measurements of a period of just a bit more than 4 days. Furthermore, later it was seen that the data of the rst and last hours of that period showed strange behaviours. As a consequence of this, it was decided to cut the original data to a period of only 92 hours, in which it was sure that the measurements were more accurate. Thus, in all this paper the used data will belong to that period of time. The available data for the development of this paper is the following: a) Fluxes of cosmic rays of multiplicity 1 and 2 for dierent angles of incidence, namely 0 -30 , 30 -45 and 45 -90 . b) Intrinsic eciency of the detector for events of multiplicity 1 and 2, estimated through an analysis of the deposited charge. (See section 4.2) c) Atmospheric pressure in Darmstadt during the 92 hours interval. d) Daily maximum and minimum temperatures in Frankfurt airport (closest meteorological station to Darmstadt). It is important to note here that the pressure data had relative low resolution (1 hPa) and thus the pressure prole over the time interval was not a soft curve. To x this, a 10 minutes average of the pressure was computed and, then, the moving average technique was applied, averaging each point with its closet 36 neighbours and softening considerably the pressure curve. This can be seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Softening of the pressure data using the moving average technique. The dots are the 10 min. average of the pressure and the continous line is the softened curve. 5

Having said that, everything is ready now to begin with the paper. Previous to the analysis of any data, some general notions about cosmic rays and RPC based detectors will be introduced.

About Cosmic Rays

Cosmic Ray is a rather general term which applies to highly energetic particles that arrive to the Earth coming from outer space, most of them being protons and alpha particles, with some contribution of heavier elements (especially iron) [1]. When these particles arrive to the Earth they collide with the atoms and molecules of our atmosphere, producing in that interaction a shower of new particles that arrive to the Earth surface, mostly electrons and muons. Thus two kinds of cosmic rays are distinguished, the original particles coming from outer space are refered as primary cosmic rays, and the particles produced in the intercation with our atmosphere are known as secondary cosmic rays. The energy of the primary particles is very diverse, ranging from almost the rest up to a few Joules [1]. This wide spectrum of energies is the result of cosmic rays having dierent origins. The less energetic ones, below a few GeV, are most likely to come from the Sun as part of the solar wind, even though exceptionally, when the sun produces a so called CME1 , the protons may reach energies up to 100GeV. Cosmic rays above this energy can not be produced in the solar sistem and thus they may have galactic or extragalactic origin. Taking into account the size and mean magnetic eld of our galaxy we may assume that particles with energies below 1017 are not able to leave our galaxy and keep conned in it. Thereby we consider paricles below that energy as galactic cosmic rays (GCR) and particles above it as extragalactic cosmic rays. Depending on the kind of particle and its energy, cosmic rays will experience dierent penetration lengths in the atmosphere. Figure 2 shows a schematic view of this fact: below a few GeV most of the cosmic rays are produced in the Sun and hence, the ux depends on the solar activity. At this energy, the rate is of about 103 /m2 s and they are usually measured indirectly using satellites or detectors that measure the neutrons produced when they collide in the top of the atmosphere. Above that energy and up to 1015 eV, cosmic rays are measured mainly using detectors placed in satellites or in balloons. Finally, for higher energies, the rate of cosmics is so small that they have to be measured at the Earth surface using big arrays of detectors.

Figure 2: Energy spectrum of Cosmic Rays and main detection techniques. One of the main interest in cosmic rays is the fact that their ux measured in the Earth is not constant. Variations in the rate of cosmic rays measured at diferent heights can be the consequence of diferent causes, which can be summarized as follows:
1 Coronal

Mass Ejection.

3.1

Cosmic Ray modulation

The solar activity is the main modulator of the primary cosmic ray ux, in periods of high solar activity the heliosfere will have a higher screening eect in the galactic and extragalactic cosmic rays caused by the increased solar wind, leading to a decline in the net primary cosmic ray ux across the solar system. This anticorrelation between solar activity and cosmic ray ux follows the 11 year solar cycle as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Anticorrelation between number of sunspots and CR ux Furthermore, punctual solar events like CME also have a direct impact in the cosmic ray ux, having two possible outcomes: if the average energy of the interplanetary CME is not high enough the only eect they can produce is to screen the galactic cosmic rays background, producing a so call Forbush Decrease (FD), on the other side if the energy of the particles is higher than the threshold magnetic rigidity of the corresponding latitude (up to 14 GeV) the particles will be able to surpass the Earths magnetic eld and reach the surface, causing a sudden increase in the cosmic ray ux called Ground Level Enhancement (GLE). These proccesses are ilustrated in Figure 4. Apart from the Solar modulation and its 11-year cycle, cosmic rays show also a clear diurnal variation. This can be seen, for example, in Figure 4a where a 24 hour periodicity is shown. This 24-hour period can be understood as a consequence of the rotation of the Earth in the course of a day in respect to the Sun and its Magnetic eld. Fourier analysis of this sinusoidal behavior in large amounts of data have shown in many

(a) Forbush decrease

(b) GLE

Figure 4: Examples of measured FD and GLE

(a) Components

(b) Time width and density

Figure 5: Extended Air Shower properties dierent studies the existence of at least the three rst harmonics of the daily variation, namely the diurnal, semi-diurnal and tri-diurnal components. The existence of a fourth component is still controversial.[6] Untill now all the eects shown here have a direct impact on the primary cosmic rays, which therefore causes also an impact on the secondary cosmic rays measured at sea level. Apart from those eects, there are other variables that have only inuence in the secondary particle ux, and these properties are the ones of the place where the secondary cosmic rays are produced, the atmosphere. The Earths atmosphere, considered as a gas, has dierent eect over the secondary particle ux measured at sea level depending on its pressure, density and temperature, but to explain this it is convenient to rst introduce some aspects about how secondary cosmic rays are produced, the particle showers they cause and how they reach the surface.

3.2

Cosmic Rays and the atmosphere. Structure of particle showers.

Because of its high energy, primary cosmic rays cannot easily traverse the atmosphere of Earth since they interact with nuclei of atmospheric gases, such as nitrogen and oxygen, usually in the lower stratosphere. As said before, secondary particles are generated out of these interactions, creating a shower of secondary products [9]. The showers are composed of three principal components: the electromagnetic component, the muon component and the nucleonic component, as shown in Figure 5a . The electromagnetic or soft component includes electrons, positrons and photons. The muon component is also known as hard component. Both those components are generated from the decay of unstable hadrons and, nally, the hadronic nucleonic component consist of mostly suprathermal protons and neutrons [3]. The way these particles are transported along the atmosphere is also a well known proccess and the mean properties of extended air showers have been well determined. It is known that the higher energy muons arrive closer to the core, forming small angles with the axis of the shower, and arrive near the v = c front. On the other side, lower energy muons will arrive later, preferentially in the tails of the shower, thus the time interval between the rst and the last muon (time witdh) t (r) will increase very signicantly with the distance r to the axis of the shower. Also, the size of the shower is very related to the energy of the original primary cosmic ray. A schematic view of this can be seen in Figure 5b. [1] Theoretically, with a detector or set of detectors with high time and space resolution (like RPCs) it would be possible to measure faithfully both the time prole and the density of particles of a shower, making it possible to estimate the properties of the shower and the primary cosmic ray itself. 8

Now, going back to the atmospheric properties, it is known that the muonic component of air showers is strongly correlated to the eective temperature of the atmosphere, where the eective temperature is dened as a weighted average that takes into account the distribution of altitudes where the mesons which cause the measured muons occur. This eect is specially signicative for very high energy muons that are very sensitive to the temperature of the stratosphere. This was shown by the underground experiment MINOS in the Soudan mine in Minnesota and can be seen in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Muon rate and Eective temperature measured by the MINOS experiment in the Soudan mine. Both independent measurements show a very signicative correlation. Apart form the temperature, the other main magnitude of the atmosphere that has a direct impact on the cosmic ray ux is the pressure. More pressure means higher amount of air over a determined place, meaning that the particle showers will experience more collisions in their way to the surface and, therefore, lowering the net ux of secondary cosmic rays at ground level. As explained here there are quite a few eects that can lead to a change in the sea level cosmic ray ux, and by studying each of them we can obtain direct information from the state of our Sun, changes in the magnetic eld and the properties of the higher atmosphere, whose study can provide us more clues on how the dynamics of the stratosphere aect the weather in the troposphere, allowing possible improvements over the current weather forecasting. It is therefore very important to identify and separate each of these eects in the cosmic ray data if we want to be able to make an individual study of each of them. This is one of the main tasks of this paper where the data, gathered by a RPC detector, will need to be corrected for several variables to have a clean view of the diurnal variation explained above, which will be deeply studied in the followng pages. In the next section a quick look at how the RPCs work will be taken, and the correction of the data by the intrinsic eciency of the detector will be performed.

4
4.1

The HADES RPC detector

Description of the detector

RPCs or Resistive Plate Chambers are basically gas ionization detectors. They are composed of multiple cells lled with gas2 and count with two electrodes that generate an electric eld inside each cell. The general operating principles of these detectors are the following: a) The gas within the cell ionise when a charged particle passes through. b) The unbound electrons and ions get accelerated to the electrodes by the applied magnetic eld. In their way to the electrodes this particles can led to more ionizations in the gas, generating an avalanche of charged particles. c) Thanks to this avalanche, enough current is produced in the electrodes and can be registered by the aquisition equipment. d) The process stops once all the charges have been absorbed. Besides the normal propagation of avalanches also another fenomena called streamer can happen. Sometimes the charge created by electron avalanches gives rise to an additional electric eld. This eld can enhance the growth of new avalanches in a particular direction. Then the ionized region grows quickly in that direction, forming a nger-like discharge called a streamer. Avalanches and stramers are the two processes that can generate a signal on the detector. One of the principal characteristic of the detectors used here is that they can be able to determine the angle of incidence of the particles. Thanks to the great spatial and temporal resolution of the RPCs, by placing two of them one over the other like shown in Figure 7a, the trajectory of the particle can be tracked in this way: the particle will produce a signal in one cell of each detector, then, by knowing the position of these cells the trajectory followed by the particle can be tracked. This is performed by an algorithm called TimTrack developed by J.A. Garz on.[11]

(a) Setup for taking cosmic ray data with couples of RPC detectors of the HADES low angles TOF wall at the GSI (Darmstadt).

(b) Scheme of a RPC detectorl

Figure 7: Structure and set up of the RPCs Thanks to this tracking feature, uxes of cosmic rays with dierent angles of incidence have been measured, allowing a separate study of these components that will be performed in the following sections. Before starting the analysis of any data it is essencial to perform the necessary corrections to it, and the rst one that should be done is the estimation of the eciency of these detectors. This is explained in the next section.
2 the

gas in the RPCs of HADES is a mixture of 90% freon and 10% Sulfur Hexauoride

10

4.2

Estimation of the detector eciency

The estimation of the eciency of any detector is a complex and tedious process since there is not a direct way for measuring it. Hence, it is usually required the use of indirect techniques or Monte Carlo simulations. In the case of HADES RPCs, the estimation of its eciency has been deeply studied in the Ph.D. thesis of G. Kornakov [2], and here just a simple description of how it was performed will be presented. The method used for the estimation of the detector eciency takes into account the charge spectra of the RPC, and this is, the charge deposited in the detector by the incident (and measured) particles. This method is based in the fact that only events that have surpassed the energy threshold will be measured, so that signals that fall under this energy will be cut from the charge spectra. This can be seen in Figure 8 where white area corresponds to the measured avalanches and the red area corresponds to streamer events. By tting the exponential behavior of the white area and extrapolating it to lower energies the blue area is obtained, which represents the number of events whose energy did not surpass the threshold and therefore were not measured.

Figure 8: Eciency and streamer fraction determination from the charge spectra. The black line represents the charge distribution, the red line is the function used to calculate the ineciency area (blue) and the blue line delimits the separation between normal avalanches and streamers, (red). With this method the eciency can be computed as the ratio between the white+red area and the total area. However, it is important to note that the eciency calculated in this way is very sensitive to changes in the average composition of the particle showers. Changes in the energy spectrum of the incident particles will aect the shape of the white curve and the slope of the black line, having direct consequences on the estimation of the blue area. Also, since RPCs are gaseous detectors, changes in temperature and pressure will have also an impact on the eciency of each cell since they aect to the density of the inner gas, with higher density meaning higher ionisarion probability and therefore greater eciency. Thus, in gereral the eciency could be expressed as:
tf f

=
ti

f(N, E, T, P) dt

(1)

Being the eciency a function of the energy and number of particles, atmospheric pressure and temprerature for the data gathered between the instants ti and tf . It is therefore very important to study the prediction capabilities of this eciency, seeing how it is correlated to those variables, to check if it actually is a good estimation of the real eciency. This will be performed in the next section.

4.3

Eect of room Temperature and Pressure on RPC gaseous detectors

As said before, the eciency of the detector was estimated without taking into account the ambient pressure and temperature and thus the eect of those variables may have not been corrected properly. One problem 11

here is that, unfortunately, the temperature in the room was not being measured and this, in principle, can be an important inconvenient. To try to solve it some dierent hypothesis about how the temperature could have changed in time have been tested, but any of them has proved to be accurate. Therefore, only the correlation between eciency and pressure will be studied here and, from the results, some interpretations will be discussed about how the eciency could have been aected by other variables. A more in depth study of the correlations between dierent variables will be performed in section 6, where tools of multivariate analysis will be applied to the available data.

Figure 9: Comparison between the Eciency for one-partice events (blue) and pressure (green) evolution in time. As seen in the Figure 9, the eciency and the pressure follow very similar behaviours, implying a strong correlation between both variables. There is, however, a rather interesting observation: sometimes it seems that the changes in the eciency are delayed respect to the changes in pressure but, other times, and here is the interesting fact, the eciency starts to change even before the pressure changes. This is something unexpected and whose interpretation might be not trivial. One of the possible contributions to this behaviour can be related to the adapting time3 of the detector, which would generate a lag between changes in pressure and eciency. This could explain how sometimes the eciency changes after the pressure, but not the other way around, so further and more detailed analysis will be required. Then, from what is seen in Figure 9 and what was explained in section 4, a linear dependence between eciency and pressure is expected. This doesnt mean that there arent any other variables that aect the eciency, because there are. It means that overall, if a plot of eciency vs pressure is done, a general linear tendency will be seen. This has been representend in Figure 10 where, in fact, over all the oscillations and variations in the curve, a general linear dependence is shown. There are, however some characteristic events where the eciency grows almost vertically, meaning that even at constant pressure there can be meaningful variations in the eciency. In principle, this variations could be originated by changes in the temperature or in the average composition of the cosmic ray showers, but by now nothing looks clear. To try to shed more light on this topic, a linear t of the data has been performed as seen in Figure 10. The utility of this linear regression resides on the fact that it can help to have a more quantitative value of the linear correlation between eciency and pressure. By doing this, and asuming that the eciency can be written in this way:
3 Amount

of time that the detector needs to adapt to changes in the external pressure

12

f (P )

f (N, E, T, ...)

(2)

then, by considering that the term f (P ) is actually the tted linear function, it can be substracted to the total eciency f and thus the remaining result will be just the variations to the eciency caused by all the other variables that are not pressure. This is equivalent to analyzing the residuals of the tting.

(a) Multiplicity 1

(b) Multiplicity 2

Figure 10: Eciency vs Pressure linear ttings for events of multiplicity 1 and 2. In other words, the eect of the pressure over the eciency has been isolated and substracted, leaving a plot of data where the eect of the other variables can be studied. These plots are shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11: Ecience variations not caused by pressure for events of multiplicity 1 and 2. These variations are the ones that sometimes cause the eciency to change before the pressure and viceversa, and the behavior of this oscillations is actually quite interesting. As seen in Figure 12, the sinusoidal tting of the residuals appears to suggest that they actually follow a 12-hour period. 13

Figure 12: Sinusoidal tting for the residuals of the eciency in events of multiplicity 1. From the tting, a period of 12.232(0.076) hours is obtained. To explain this, it is important to remember that the method used to calculate the eciency is very sensitive to the kind of incident particles, and one of the possible hypothesis to explain this 12-hour periodicity could be this one: As explained in section 3, apart from the 24hour peridicity, cosmic rays also present a semidiurnal (12-hour) component. If this component causes showers with dierent average particle composition than the 24-hour component then it would be possible that it would be aecting the eciency and, thereby, causing the observed 12-hour periodiciy. Of course, this has to be taken with a pinch of salt since nothing has been proven, and further analysis will be required. In case that these variations in the eciency were actually caused by the semidiurnal component of the cosmic rays, then by correcting the measured data with this eciency we would be kind of supressing or atenuating the 12 hour component in the cosmic ray data and thus aecting to the Fourier analysis that will be performed in section 5. Finally, to further study the behavior of the residuals, a cuantitative analysis of these deviations has been done by setting up an histogram where the number of times that the eciency variation falls in a determined interval is counted. Such histogram will show a distribution of counts that resembles the shape of a gaussian and, thereby, by perforing a tting to that curve, we will have a better idea of how the ditribution of the oscillations is.

(a) Hist 1

(b) Hist 2

Figure 13: Histograms of eciency variation for events of multiplicity 1 and 2

14

The obtained histograms appear to be almost identical, but if a closer look is taken then it turns out that they are not actuallly that similar. While the distribution for the one-particle events is centered in 0, the histogram for multiplicity 2 is centered in the negative part of the axis, around -0.005. Also, by looking at the tails of both distributions it is seen that 13b is, in fact, around twice as wide as 13a. One possible explanation of this comes from the multiplicity of the events presented in each histogram: for events of mutiplicity 1 the eciency represents the probability of detecting one single particle, this probability will be called . On the other side, for multiplicity 2 events the probability of measuring one event is the probability of measuring two particles at the same time, and this is 2 . This is in well agreement with the eciency represented in 10, where the values of the eciency for mutiplicity 2 events are just the square of the values for events of multiplicity 1, and this has a direct impact in the shape of the histograms, making the one for multiplicity 2 events much wider and with the center moved to the left.

Cosmic Ray Data Analysis

The next step is to perform the pressure correction of the dierent uxes. As seen in the beginning of this paper, the atmospheric pressure has a direct impact in the net cosmic ray ux measured at the Earth surface. As a consequence, besides the ecency correction already analized we need to correct this eect in order to have a clear view at the diurnal CR periodicity. A simple way to nd this correlation is explained in [4] and here the same procedure will be followed. The anti-correlation between the pressure and the counting rate of any secondary cosmic ray component may be computed by the simple formula: N = a + 0 P (3) N where N is the mean cosmic ray ux and N is the variation in the counting rate due to a variation P in the atmospheric pressure at the level of observation, taking as reference the minimum value of pressure in the N time interval considered. Thus, by ploting N versus P a linear relation will be seen and the coecients a and 0 will be obtained by a simple linear tting. Here, 0 is the so called absorption coecient which takes into account the screening eect of the atmosphere over the secondary cosmic rays. Its value is always negative and depends on the secondary component considered, that is, for every angle of incidence the value will be dierent. In fact, as explained in [5], it is well known that the barometric coecient decreases with the zenital angle due to the larger energy threshold for incoming muons which have to traverse a larger atmospheric layer. Here, with the data available, three intervals of zenit angles (namely 0 -30 , 30 -45 and 45 -90 ) can be studied separately and its dierences will be analyzed. One thing that should noted here is that dierent particles have also dierent atenuation coecients. Protons, neutrons, muons... have dierent probability of interacting with the particles of the atmosphere and therefore experience dierent atenuations, and a problem here is that the uxes that will be analyzed contain a mix af many kinds of particles since the measurements made by the RPC coud not separate them. Thus, the calculated values of the absorption coecients will be an average of the 0 of each particle detected. Once all the absorption coecients have been calculated, the corrected cosmic ray ux can be computed by simply applying the following expression: Nc = N e0 P (4)

Where N is the measured ux and Nc is the corrected counting rate by taking as reference the minimum pressure. When the pressure reaches its minimum then P = 0 and the corrected ux equals the measured cosmic rays, but when the pressure grows then P > 0 and the exponent becomes positive, making the corrected ux higher than the measured one, just like it would be expected. In the following section all the absorption coecients will be calculated and the correspponding graphics with the results will be shown. 15

5.1

Determination of the absorption coecients

Here the absorption coecients for cosmic rays of multiplicity 1 and 2 and angles in intervals 0 -30 , 30 -45 and 45 -90 will be computed. In rst place, and to have a general view, linear regressions of the total uxes for multiplicities 1 and 2 will be performed, as shown in Figure 14. Then, in Figures 15 and 16 a separate look will be taken at the dierent angles of incidence, both for multiplicity 1 and 2.

(a) Multiplicity 1

(b) Multiplicity 2

Figure 14: Linear tting for pressure correction for events of multiplicity 1 and 2. These are total uxes, meaning that all angles of incidence have been considered. Multiplicity 1 2 a 2.36(0.11) 7.00(0.18) 0 (%/hPa) -0.486(0.021) -1.447(0.034)

From the linear regressions made in Figure 14 it can be seen in the table above that the absorption coecient 0 is clearly bigger (in a factor 3) for two-particle events compared to one-particle events.

(a) 0 -30

(b) 30 -45

(c) > 45

Figure 15: Linear ttings for pressure correction for events of multiplicity 1 with dierent angles of incidence. Incidence Angle 0 -30 30 -45 > 45 a 2.48(0.13) 2.29(0.12) 2.15(0.12) 0 (%/hPa) -0.509(0.024) -0.473(0.022) -0.444(0.021)

As shown in the table above, for one-particle events the absorption coecient 0 seems to clearly reduce for bigger zenit angles.

16

(a) 0 -30

(b) 30 -45

(c) > 45

Figure 16: Linear ttings for pressure correction for events of multiplicity 2 with dierent angles of incidence. Incidence Angle 0 -30 30 -45 > 45 a 7.27(0.23) 7.55(0.28) 6.79(0.29) 0 (%/hPa) -1.463(0.042) -1.503(0.051) -1.345(0.053)

Finally, for two particle events, 0 also tends to decrease for bigger zenit angles. The second value actually grows, but its not very substantial and the discrepancy falls within one standard deviation. The results shown here are not directly comparable with coecients found in other articles. This is, as noted before, because the measured uxes are a mix of dierent particles with dierent penetration lengths, while the analysis found in other articles usually centers its attention in only one kind of particles. Overall, two clear eects are observed here: a) The atenuation coecients are 3 times lower for one-particle events than for events of multiplicity 2. This is something not completely understood, but probably has something to do with the fact that for multiplicity 1 events there are so many dierent radiations that can be producing a signal on the detector, while for multiplicity 2 only pairs of events detected in coincidence are measured, giving as a result a much cleaner set of data. b) The atenuation coecients decrease with higher zenit angles. This was something expected caused by the fact that particles arriving with higher angles must be more energetic [8] (and thus, more penetrating), to arrive to the detector, which implies a lower atenuation coecient. Now that the 0 for all angles has been calculated, the correction of the uxes can be performed by applying equation 4. In the next section a comparison between the uxes before and after the correction is shown and, after this, the Fourier analysis of the 24-h periodicity will be performed.

17

5.2

Corrected Fluxes

As said before, to have a general view about how the correction has worked a before and after comparison will be shown here. Only total uxes for one and two-particle events will be represented.

Figure 17: Total ux for one-particle events before the pressure correction (left) and after (right)

Figure 18: Total ux for two-particle events before the pressure correction (left) and after (right) From Figures 17 and 18 it can clearly be seen that the correction has worked as expected. When the pressure was high the correction has bumped the rate of cosmic rays and has left it invariant when the pressure was minimum (because it was taken as the reference pressure). A picture of how the pressure had changed over this period of time can be seen at Figures 9 and 1. Having checked this, its time to go to the interesting section (and main purpose of this paper) of the Fourier analysis of the solar modulation.

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5.3

Fourier Analysis of the corrected data

As seen in Figures 17 and 18, an apparent oscillation exists in both uxes. It was explained in section 3 that at least 3 harmonics of the 24-hour periodicity have been observed. The purpose of this present section will be to examine the data available and check if those three harmonics can be seen and, therefore, proving the great capabilities of the RPCs for cosmic ray analysis. For doing this, a similar approach to what has been done in [7] will be followed and, that is, a tting of the available uxes to a Fourier series will be performed. Since the interest of the analysis is only on the rst 3 harmonics, the tting will be limited to the rst 3 terms of the Fourier series. Also, to improve the quality of the tted curve, a polynomial term will be added which will take into account the galactic cosmic ray ux variations under the main oscillation. Thus, the tting function will be the next one:
3

F = a0 + ax t + ay t2 + az t3 +
i=1

[ai cos(it

2 2 ) + bi sin(it )] t0 t0

(5)

where the rst 4 terms are the 3rd degree polynomial and the summatory contains the rst three terms of the Fourier series. First, lets begin with the one-particle Cosmic Rays:

(a) 0 -30

(b) 30 -45

(c) > 45

Figure 19: Fourier + 3rd degree polynomial for events of multiplicity 1 at dierent incidence angles As seen in these 3 pictures, there is a rather interesting and unexpected behavior: the periodicity of the cosmic ray ux is not 24 hours, in fact its nor even close to this number. In Figure 19a the distance in time between the rst two minimums is of around 22 hours, reducing to just 18h between the 2nd and 3rd , to 16h between the 3rd and 4th and even to 15h between the last two minimums. The reason of this strange periodicity is unknown, but the little amount of data available combined with the fact that multiplicity 1 events can have very dierent properties probably have something to say in here. This is somethig that will require further analysis and it will probably be an interesting topic to research once the RPCs will be located in our Faculty. Because of the lack of a constant periodicity, a Fourier analysis makes no sense here. Actually, for the interval 0 -30 a tting to the equation 5 was performed, just in case something could actually be seen. By doing this, a periodicity of 21h was obtained for the tted function but, as it can be observed in Figure 19a, it doesnt describe well the position of all maximums and minimus due to the dierences in frequency of the data. On the other side, by looking at Figure 20, it is clear that the two-particle uxes do present a 24-hour periodicity so, whatever is the cause of the anomalies in Figure 19 it only aects to the counting of multiplicity 1 events. Fittings to Equation 5 for the two-particle counts have been performed for all angles and the results are shown in Figure 20.

19

(a) 0 -30

(b) 30 -45

(c) > 45

Figure 20: Fourier + 3rd degree polynomial for events of multiplicity 2 at dierent incidence angles 1st harmonic a1 b1 -18.5(5.3) -29.9(4.2) -3.9(3.9) -21.6(2.7) -3.0(3.6) -13.0(2.4) 2nd harmonic a2 b2 7.1(3.2) -0.7(3.8) 8.2(2.8) 3.2(3.2) 3.4(2.5) -3.3(2.8) 3rd harmonic a3 b3 0.7(3.3) 2.7(3.2) 0.7(3.2) 5.0(2.6) 0.9(2.8) -2.6(2.4)

Angle 0 -30 30 -45 > 45

Period (hours) 24.76(0.30) 24.07(0.28) 24.25(0.45)

Red. Chi-Sqr 1.2427 1.2518 1.2536

The table above contains the coecients of the 3 Fourier components obtained in the tting, with the numbers in brackets being the associated standard deviation. The coecients of the polynomial are not shown since they are not of our interest. As seen, for the three angles the shape of the tted function changes noticeably, suggesting that depending on the angle of incidence the harmonics may have dierent phases and amplitudes. Looking at the numbers it is obvious that the dominant component is the 24-hour harmonic, followed by the second, with the third one being the less dominant. However, relative to the rst harmonic, the third component is much stronger for the intervals 30 -45 and > 45 than for vertical incidence. To further study the periodicity of this two-particle ux it can be useful to make a 24-hour folding of the total ux and, therefore, having an average of the oscillation for the complete measured period. In this way a more clean sinusoid is obtained and thus a better tting can be performed. This is shown in Figure 21.

Figure 21: 24h folding of the data, showing the diurnal eect for multiplicity 2 events.

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Period (hours) 24 (forced)

1st harmonic a1 b1 3.0(5.1) -52.2(5.0)

2nd harmonic a2 b2 25.1(5.0) 4.1(5.1)

3rd harmonic a3 b3 1.1(5.0) -1.4(5.1)

Red. Chi-Sqr 1.4492

For this tting the period has been xed to 24 hours, this is because by doing the folding we are already assuming that exact periodicity. From the results in the table above it is quite clear the presence of at least the rst and second harmonics, with the third one being questionable. This can be considered as a good result bearing in mind that only 4 days of data have been used, encouraging us to continue the research in this topic and in the use of RPCs in the study on Cosmic Rays.

Finally, to have a more graphical comparison of the obtained results, the next image is included. It represents the corrected uxes for multiplicity 2 events in the three dierent angle intervals, including the tted function for each of them, and where the diurnal periodity is denitely observed.

Figure 22: Comparison of multiplicity 2 uxes with dierent angles of incidence. 0 -30 (top), 30 -45 (middle) and 45 -90 (bottom).The tted function is plotted in red. A 24h periodicity is clear in all the three intervals.

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6
6.1

Multivariate Analysis
Introduction and hypothesis

Finally, it was found convenient that, to complete the previous results, tools of multivariate analysis coulld be applied to the current data. The objective of this is to determine the correlations between all the available variables, centering our attention in which ones aect the most to the eciency (apart from the pressure, which was already studied in section 4.3). Here also a couple of hypothesis about how the temperature could have changed have been included, one for the ambient temperature in the building and another one for the external temperature. For the ambient temperature in the laboratory a 24-hour sinusoidal behaviour has been considered, with a minimum and a maximum of 20 C and 25 C at 2:00am and 2:00pm respectively. This estimation was made bearing in mind that when the measurements of cosmic where done (October) the heating in the room keeped the temperature at at least 20 C, with a possible increase in the central hours of the day. For the estimation of the outside temperature a similar sinusoidal approach was followed, but this time using the daily maximum and minimum temperatures measured in the meteorological station in the Frankfurt airport (closest station to Darmstadt). The maximum and the minimum where also set to occur at 2:00pm and 2:00am. A plot of the resulting temperature can be seen in Figure 23. The small discontinuities are a consequence of having dened the temperature as a piecewise function, where each day has its own aplitude.

Figure 23: Hypothersis for the variation of the external temperature. The multivariate analysis will be based in the methodologies explained in [10]. The rst step is to set up a m n matrix X which contains all the variables that will be studied,whith m being each variable and n the number of data. In this case 4 variables will be considered, namely pressure, eciency, particle ux and the inverse of the temperature, each of them having 552 points of data. It is important to note that both the multiplicity 1 and 2 uxes will be tested, and also internal and external temperature will be analyzed separately. Because of this, to embrace all the posibilities, a total of four X matrices will be created. The linear correlation between two variables is given by the correlation coecients in the correlation matrix R. As said before, the process of obtaining those matrices is properly explained in [10], and it is a bit too long to include here, so only the results will be presented. In the following section the multivariate analysis of the dierent cases listed above will be carried out. As a rst example, the results for the case of events of multiplicity 1 and internal temperature will be examined. The subindices 1,2 and i,e indicate the multiplicity and temperature analyzed (i for internal and e for external): 22

6.2
6.2.1

Analysis of the dierent cases

Multiplicity 1 and internal temperature 1.0000 0.9070 0.9070 1.0000 R1i = 0.7110 0.5763 0.1936 0.2414 0.7110 0.5763 1.0000 0.0810 0.1936 0.2414 0.0810 1.0000

Here the rst column is pressure, the second if eciency, the third is the particle ux and the last one is the inverse of the temperature. The same applies to the rows. Therefore this matrix is obviously symmetrical and the main diagonal is the unity since each variable is perfectly correlated with itself. Judging from the numbers it is quite clear that the most correlated variables are the pressure & eciency (0.9070) and the pressure & particle ux (-0.7110). This is something already expected from what was aready seen in sections 4.3 and 5.1: higher pressure means more detector eciency and less particle ux at ground level, thus the correlation and anticorrelation between those variables. Meanwhile, the internal temperature seems to dont have any signicant correlation with the other variables. As explained, this matrix gives the correlation of the variables in pairs, but further correlations can be performed. By doing the correct operations (again, [10]) the multiple correlation coecients can be calculated. These coecients give us how related is one variable with all the others, not just one. This is the same as saying that if all variables are known except one, those numbers will tell how predictable is that variable from the data of the others. In this case the obtained multiple correlation coecients are the following: 0.8773 0.8336 m1i = 0.5718 0.1417 As seen, the most predictable variable is the pressure (0.8773), followed by the eciency (0.8336) with also the particle ux having some signicance due to its correlation with the pressure. Finally, one last test can be performed. The correlation matrix R measures the correlation between two variables, but doesnt consider the fact that some of them might be correlated through an intermediate variable and, that is, maybe variable 3 depends on variable 2 and, at the same time, variable 2 depends on another variable 1 meaning that in fact 3 depends on 1 in an indirect way, which is something the matrix R is neglecting. To x this, a so-called partial correlation matrix P can be created, whose coecients will only measure the partial correlations between the variables, that is, considering that all the other variables are xed. For the present case the matrix P has the following values: 1.0000 0.8457 0.5526 0.1116 0.8457 1.0000 0.1934 0.0932 P1i = 0.5526 0.1934 1.0000 0.2916 0.1116 0.0932 0.2916 1.0000 This mainly conrms the correlation between pressure & eciency (0.8457) and the pressure & particle ux (-0.5526) but also helps to deny the relation between eciency and particle ux which was somehow apparent in the matrix R (0.1934 vs -0.5763), this is also something expected since the particle uxes analyzed here were already corrected by eciency. Now that the study for the case of events of multiplicity 1 and internal temperature has been nished, the results for the three remaining cases will be presented:

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6.2.2

Multiplicity 1 and external temperature 1.0000 0.9070 0.7110 0.9070 1 .0000 0.5763 R1e = 0.7110 0.5763 1.0000 0.6433 0.7072 0.2296 0.8817 0.8498 m1e = 0.5968 0.5693 1.0000 0.7274 0.5771 0.7274 1.0000 0.0827 P1e = 0.5771 0.0827 1.0000 0.2193 0.3243 0.3720

0.6433 0.7072 0.2296 1.0000

0.2193 0.3243 0.3720 1.0000

6.2.3

Multiplicity 2 and internal temperature 1.0000 0.9070 0.8736 0.1936 0.9070 1.0000 0.8898 0.2414 R2i = 0.8736 0.8898 1.0000 0.3080 0.1936 0.2414 0.3080 1.0000 0.8473 0.8628 m2i = 0.8280 0.1195 1.0000 0.5809 0.3683 0.1472 0.5809 1.0000 0.4545 0.0250 P2i = 0.3683 0.4545 1.0000 0.2477 0.1472 0.0250 0.2477 1.0000 Multiplicity 2 and external temperature 1.0000 0.9070 0.8736 0.6433 0.9070 1.0000 0.8898 0.7072 R2e = 0.8736 0.8898 1.0000 0.6441 0.6433 0.7072 0.6441 1.0000 0.8439 0.8773 m2e = 0.8172 0.50127 1.0000 0.5553 0.3464 0.0103 0.5553 1.0000 0.4342 0.3252 P2e = 0.3464 0.4342 1.0000 0.0466 0.0103 0.3252 0.0466 1.0000

6.2.4

24

6.3

Conclusions

From all of these results it can be seen that neither the internal nor the external temperature have a signicant correlation with any other variable. On the other side, the great correlation between eciency and pressure repeats itself time after time, and almost the same can be said for the particle ux and pressure, which mantain a strong anticorrelation. Another interesting fact is that the particle ux for multiplicity 2 events is much more predictable than the ux of one-particle events, The origin of this seems to be in a stronger partial anticorrelation between eciency and particle ux for multiplicity 2. The explanation for this event looks rather complex since the cosmic ray uxes analyzed here are already corrected for eciency and, therefore, the correlation between these two variables should be close to zero. Apart from this, the multivariant analysis has helped us to discard the possible correlations between temperature and eciency and temperature and ux (at least with the proposed hypothesis) and, therefore, minimizing our fears about not having measured the temperature during the experiment.

Final Conclusions and Considerations

In this paper it has been analyzed a set of cosmic ray ux data containing multiplicity 1 and 2 events for dierent angles, with the objective of studying the possible pressence of solar modulation eects. These data was gathered during the commissioning of the RCP detectors of the HADES spectrometer at GSI in Darmstadt (Germany). Also, a study of the correlation between the most representative variables was performed, namely atmospheric pressure, detector eciency, cosmic ray uxes and the inner and external temperatures of the experimentation area. It has been checked how the calculus of the eciency propossed by G. Kornakov in his Ph.D. thesis, which has shown its validity with the gathered cosmic ray data, keeps the expected linear relation with the pressure, although presenting some variations caused by unknown eects. Some of the possible eects responsible of this behavior could be variations in the composition of the cosmic ray showers or the adaptation time of the detector in response to changes in the external pressure. These eects would require a more detailed analysis and longer periods of available data. Overlapped to the eect of the pressure, the eciency shows a sinusoidal behaviour with a period of 12 hours, which could be caused by variations in the composition of the cosmic ray ux by the semidiurnal component of the diurnal eect. Once the eects of the pressure over the particle uxes have been corrected, those uxes show very clear periodic eects. In the case of two-particle events the uxes exhibit a clear 24h periodicity, compatible with the so-called diurnal eect. On the other side, for one-particle events there exists a more complex behaviour with important uctuations in the periodicity. This would also require a more in-depth analysis together with a more extended sample of data. Finally, multivariate techniques have been applied to the main variables, with some of the turning out to be very correlated, mainly eciency and pressure, and also pressure and particle uxes, as it would be expected. On the other side, both internal and external temperature were not really correlated to any other variable, meaning that thay have small inuence over the results here presented. Overall, the results of the analysis performed on this paper suggest that there are quite a few eects that show unexpected behaviours, requiring a more complete analysis in the future with bigger amounts of data.

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References
[1] Juan A. Garz on et al., An alisis del entorno terrestre mediante un detector de rayos c osmicos con muy alta resoluci on temporal, Journal/Editor, (2012) [2] G. Kornakov, New advances and developments on the RPC TOF wall of the HADES experiment at GSI, Journal/Editor, (2012) [3] J. Collazo M endez, Analysis of the one-cosmic-ray events taken during the commissioning of the HADES RPC wall at GSI: rst results.l, Journal/Editor, (2012) [4] R. de Asmundis et al., Using RPC Detectors as Cosmic Rays Monitor, IEEE Transactions in Nuclear Science, Vol. 54, No. 3, (2007) [5] B. Famoso, P. L. Rocca, and F. Riggi, An educational study of the barometric eect of cosmic rays with a Geiger counter, Phys. Educ., vol. 40, p. 461, (2005) [6] M. K. Richharia, Third Harmonics of cosmic ray intensity on quiet days at Deep River Neutron Monitoring Station, Indian Academy of Science, vol. 68, No. 6, p. 1007-1012, (2007) [7] R. K. Mishra, R. A. Mishra, A study of daily variation in cosmic ray intensity during high/low amplitude days, Indian Academy of Science, vol. 68, No. 3, p. 407-422, (2007) [8] V. V. Botog et al., Large Apertur Muon Hodoscope for Studies in Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (1995) [9] L.I Dorman, Cosmic Rays in the Earths Atmosphere and Underground, Springer (2004) [10] Daniel Pe na, An alisis de datos multivariantes, Mc Graw Hill, p. 86-93 (2002) [11] J. A. Garz on and P. Cabaelas, A matrix formalism for a fast time and track reconstruction with timing detectors., Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A, 661:s210-s213 (2012)

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