Measurement of cosmic ray electrons and positrons with the AMS-02 experiment

• Autor(a) principal: Mikuni, Vinicius Massami
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/76/76131/tde-29092017-143310/
• topic: AMS-02; AMS-02; Cosmic ray flux; Electron; Elétron; Fluxo de raios cósmicos; Modulação solar; Positron; Pósitron; Solar modulation

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) is a high-energy particle physics detector operating on the International Space Station (ISS) since May 2011. Since its launch, the AMS-02 provided a large amount of data whose precision was never before achieved, opening a new path for the study of cosmic rays (CRs). The first published results of AMS-021-3 show tension with the current understanding of the cosmic ray theory, particularly at higher energies. These tensions are directly linked to many fundamental questions like the dark matter nature, the CR origin and their propagation through the galaxy. This work presents the measurement of the electron flux and the positron flux in primary cosmic rays, based on the data collected between May 2011 and November 2016, an extended data set with respect to the published AMS-02 results.3 The results extend the energy range explored up to 1 TeV for electrons and up to 700 GeV for positrons, being consistent with the published results when using the same data set. A discrepancy between the new measurement and the published flux is observed in the low energy region of the electron flux, while the positron flux is in good agreement. This can be explained by a charge dependent solar modulation effect. This hypothesis was investigated by studying the time evolution of the fluxes, focusing on the energy region below 40 GeV, where an electron and positron flux is computed over 74 time bins of 27 days width, corresponding to the suns rotation period as seen from the Earth. The time dependent analysis confirms hints of charge dependent solar modulation, that are also observed by other independent analysis that have been carried out in parallel within the collaboration.