Detection of Cosmic-Ray Ensembles with CREDO

Abstract

One of the main objectives of cosmic-ray studies are precise measurements of energy and chemical composition of particles with extreme energies. Large and sophisticated detectors are used to find events seen as showers starting in the Earth's atmosphere with recorded energies larger than 100 EeV. However, a Cosmic-Ray Ensemble (CRE) developing before reaching the Earth as a bunch of correlated particles may spread over larger areas and requires an extended set of detectors to be discovered. The Cosmic-Ray Extremely Distributed Observatory (CREDO) is a solution to find such phenomena. Even simple detectors measuring the particle arrival time only are useful in this approach, as they are sufficient both to provide candidate CRE events and to determine the direction from which they are arriving.