Pierre Auger Project Progress Report

Summary (photo album)

On 15 November 2006 at the Auger collaboration meeting in Malargüe we learned that the agreements with four of the remaining five landowners have been signed. This breakthrough was due to the intense and tireless efforts of Cristina Cambiaggio of the CNEA. This additional area allows us to deploy most of the last 400 surface detector stations. There are 30 tanks detector stations already in place in these new areas. The last parcel of land has disputed ownership. The deployment of the remaining surface detector stations will take about 10 months to complete.

As of 21 December the number of completed surface detector stations in the field now exceeds 1250 of which 1190 are filled with water. Shipments of the last procurement of tanks have been coming in regularly from the vendors in Argentina and Brazil. All the tanks needed for the array plus spares should be available for assembly in the second quarter of 2007.

The last of the fluorescence buildings is now complete at Loma Amarilla and is in the hands of the FD group. Governor Cobos attended the inauguration of the building on the evening of 15 November 2006. The installation of all the mirrors and cameras is expected by the end of 2006. The slow control systems will be complete in January, 2007 and the commissioning will begin in February, 2007. The lidar building at Loma Amarilla is also complete and ready for the installation of optics.

The first tests of radio detection of showers are underway near the Balloon Launch Facility. A second group will be testing their equipment near the Central Laser Facility. These techniques, if proven to be effective, could substantially increase the sensitivity and quality of air shower measurements at the Observatory (both South and North).

WBS 1.1 Fluorescence Detector ( Jonny Kleinfeller – Karlesruhe)

Status of Loma Amarilla: The shutters, aperture boxes, filters, correcting frames, FS-Curtains, dust protection curtains are installed. All mirrors mirrors have been mounted and aligned. Five cameras are fully assembled and fixed in front of the mirrors, but not yet connected to HV/LV system and not yet aligned. The sixth camera has the mercedes reflectors missing.

The HV/LV cables are ready to be connected to the cameras in all bays.

The slow control master is installed, rain sensor, wind sensor and outside light sensors are connected ant tested. The slow control slaves in bay 1 is fully operational, bay 2 and 6 are 98% completed, but not yet operational due to some missing parts.

Eye-LAN and Mirror-LAN are operational, although not yet through the optical fibre system.

We use the copper wire backup connection.

The front end crates and mirror pcs arrived in Malargüe on 22. December 2006.

The installations at Loma Amarilla are more or less on schedule. The slow control system will be completed in the second half of January 2007. The cameras will be aligned and connected to HV/LV system as well as to the front end electronics and the mirror pcs in January 2007. Installation of the correcting lenses is schedule for the 2nd half of January 2007.

The relative calibration system will be installed in January 2007 as well.

WBS 1.2 Fluorescence Detector Electronics digital electronics and readout systems (Matthias Kleifges – FZK-IPE)

The last two months were characterised by installation work for Loma Amarilla and design work for the new DAQ (Auger North and HEAT). We proceeded in following fields:

Performance Monitoring

  • MySql data bases have been setup at all 4 buildings. The setup assures an automatic copy of the data to the new data base computer “Moni”, which can be accessed also from out side the Campus by experts.
  • With the December shift the shifter should fill the data base with calibration data from all 3 running buildings. There are also many php-scripts available to plot results on the screen to ease the shifters work.
  • Sascha Menshikov has compiled data of the monitoring diode for calibration A of the last two years. It proved that the system was stable (with some explainable exceptions).

Production for Loma Amarilla (LA)

  • With the delivery of the last batch of 50 analog boards (AB) the production of FDE items was closed. The boards were mounted on FLT boards in Karlsruhe, tested and inserted as front-end boards in the electronics for LA bay 6.
  • We have produced 3 more LCU units to be used by J. Matthews for the HEAT extension. All items have been shipped to Malargue for installation at LA in time.

Installation status of Loma Amarilla (LA)

    • The LAN infrastructure (Eye network, Mirror network) is completed as well as the electrical installation, including the UPS buffering of the bay electronics. LINUX is installed on the EyePC, but no user application program like the DAQ. This will be done by H.J. in February
    • 07.
  • Part of the slow control system is installed: 2 Bays are completed and also the bay for common terminals (bay 99). The slow control computer is installed in its rack as well as the outside sensors for light, wind speed and rain.

Software progress

  • The test program for the front-end electronic was updated to the newest version of the hardware library and event date format. It will be used to test the cameras of LA.
  • We have developed a new firmware for the GPS clock which now supports 3 different Lidar frequencies: 20 Hz, 334 Hz and 1 kHz operation. The firmware is going to be installed with the next software release of the GPS server.

R&D for Auger North and the HEAT proposal

  • The test of the new backplane design was finished successful.
  • The circuit diagram for the new SLT is finished. The PCB layout is development.
  • The circuit diagram for the new AB (Napoli) and the new FLT is work in progress. Details on how to implement the variable gain per channel are under discussion.

WBS 2.1 SD (Ingo Allekote – Instituto Balseiro)

The numbers corresponding to the period October-November 2006 are: -Tanks received and inspected in Malargue: 96

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Detectors assembled: 67

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Detectors positioned: 20

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Detectors filled with water: 19

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E-kits installed: 43

As of November 30th, 2006: -Total SD in the field: 1210 -Total SD with water: 1187 -Total SD with e-kit: 1039

Definitely, the most important news in this period is the fact that an agreement has been made with the three major landowners (Villar, Rufinelli and Bisaschi-Vicenzo-Lombardi) in the Northeast of the array. An agreement has been signed between the landowners, CNEA and the Province of Mendoza. At the beginning of December, survey work, ground preparation, tank deployment, water deployment and electronics installation has started in the land belonging to Villar.

Tank production has been completed in Argentina and the last six tanks, made by Rotoplas, are on their way to Malargue. This brings the number of tanks in Malargue to approximately 1531. Production and shipment from Rotoplastyc in Brazil continues. Both the funding and the resin are in place to complete the SD array and provide the necessary spare tanks.

Production and delivery are continuing and should be complete in the first half of 2007.

Development of tanks insulated with rotomolded foam polyethylene is continuing. Developments with the resin of a second Brazilian resin company have not been encouraging. The development of a resin for us by the A Schulman Company, supplier of our standard tank resin up to now, have been completed and arrangements are being made to ship some to Rotoplastyc for testing.

20 of the last tanks have been ordered from Rotoplas by Argentina (FUNC) and have been delivered to Malargue. Square tubing for brackets, brackets and battery boxes have been ordered and are being manufactured in quantities large enough to complete the array.

Material to assemble 4 tanks (liners, brackets, dome, small parts) are being shipped to Colorado.

WBS 5.0 DPA/Offline- (Bruce Dawson, Markus Roth and Tom Paul)

The last part of October and early November was largely devoted debugging and testing of the Offline software in preparation for a release, which was finally completed around the end of November. The new release (v2r2) includes many improvements in both the core framework and in the standard physics modules. The code is available from the SVN repository or one of the tarball download mirrors (see the wiki http://www.auger.unam.mx/AugerWiki/OfflineSoftware for details). An updated external package kit has also been prepared which includes newer versions of required libraries as well as better support for 64 bit platforms.

The Geant4-based tank simulation modules have been combined into a single module with an option to switch on the custom fast photon tracking. Comparisons with data are ongoing to verify the accuracy of the simulation. New schemes are being devised to reduce CPU requirements for SD simulations for cases in which the shower core lands close to a station.

Significant revisions on the core framework codes have begun with the goal of improving long term maintainability and support more thorough acceptance testing. Details are available on the Offline milestones page:

https://www.auger.unam.mx/AugerWiki/OfflineMileStones

In addition, several minor changes the parametrisation of the lateral distribution function have been implemented. The results for inclined showers (<75°) are much more stable. Physics validation (SD/Hybrid) is ongoing including comparisons of results of v2r2 with v2r0 using the ADST root files. The Observer will provide the reprocessed data for v2r2 at the usual site:

http://augerobserver.fzk.de

WBS 8.0 Education and Outreach (Greg Snow – University of Nebraska)

Auger film receives award

The film “Messengers from Space” created by Cristina Raschia and Beatriz García was recognized as the best educational video at the 2nd Scientific Cinema Festival sponsored by the Secretary of Science and Technology in Argentina. An article in the Mendoza newspaper Los Andes covered the award on November 7. The film, aimed at children aged 6 to 11, had its first public viewing in Malargüe during the November 2006 collaboration meeting.

Northern site outreach position filled at Lamar Community College

Lamar Community College (LCC) received funding for a one-year position largely devoted to Auger Observatory outreach from the Colorado Community College system. The position was widely advertised in the early autumn 2006. A search committee consisting of 3 LCC staff members, a local land owner, and G. Snow from the Observatory reviewed applications in September and October, and the top 2 candidates were interviewed on November 6. Mr. Bradley Thompson has accepted the position and will start at LCC in early January 2007. Brad has a master’s degree in physics and has broad experience teaching physics, math, and computer science at international high schools in several foreign countries. Brad will become a member of he Observatory’s outreach task and will meet with Observatory colleagues in early January to chart a program of outreach and public relations activities largely linked to the emerging northern hemisphere site in Colorado. The funding received by LCC includes support for Brad’s travel, for consumable supplies like brochures and posters, and for establishing a temporary Auger Visitor Center at LCC.

The remainder of this report covers outreach events that took place during the November 2006 collaboration meeting.

Hans Blümer’s Public Lecture

On the evening of November 14 in the Convention Center, Hans Blümer presented a talk in English about high energy cosmic rays and the Auger Observatory to an audience of 125 local teachers and students. The event was organized on the Malargüe side by an English teacher Mariela Milicevic and her colleagues. The talk included a number of new animations. Many of the students prepared questions in advance which led to a lively discussion session after the talk. Photos appears in the photo gallery of this report.

The Auger Visitor Center

The Visitor Center (VC) on the Auger campus recently surpassed 25,000 visitors since its opening in the fall of 2001. The tally of visitors, compiled by Analía Cáceres, reached 25,972 by the middle of November 2007. During the collaboration meeting, a Visitor Center review panel chaired by Angela Olinto critiqued the Powerpoint and video materials that Analía and other collaborators present to visiting groups as well as the VC displays and posters. The review panel submitted a report of findings and recommendations to the Auger management and the Education/Outreach task leader. The recommendations include the regular updating of the presentation materials and posters, enlisting professional designers to improve the presentation materials and displays, and making an effort to bring a larger number of regional school groups to the VC. The Education/Outreach task is translating the panel’s recommendations into action items for the upcoming year.

Inauguration of the Loma Amarilla Fluorescence Detector Building

On the afternoon of November 15, the Loma Amarilla fluorescence detector building was inaugurated with a ribbon-cutting ceremony that drew over 100 Auger collaborators, representatives from the Mendoza Province and Malargüe governments, and media representatives. Speakers included project manager Paul Mantsch and Mendoza Province governor Julio Cobos. The event received wide press coverage on Mendoza television and in provincial newspapers. Photos from the event appear in the photo gallery.

Rebeca López Professional Development Workshop

Rebeca López continued her series of hands-on professional development workshops for regional science teachers. Three Malargüe teachers attended Rebeca’s 2-hour workshop the evening of November 15 at the present James Cronin School. During the meeting, Rebeca and the teachers constructed a number of optical devices such as a kaleidoscope using inexpensive materials for use in the classroom.

The James Cronin School Inauguration

The official inauguration of the James Cronin School took place the morning of November 16. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was attended by many Auger collaborators, representatives from the Mendoza and Malargüe governments, and media representatives. A flag raising ceremony was followed by a number of speeches, including Jim Cronin, Malargüe mayor Raúl Rodriguez, and Mendoza governor Julio Cobos. The event received wide press coverage on television, radio, and newspapers. In the evening of the same day, the students and teachers from the school held a separate inaugural celebration that included student projects on display in the new school’s classrooms, plus dance and theatrical performances by the students. The school will enjoy full time occupation when classes resume in March 2007 after the summer holidays. Photos from the inauguration events appear in the photo gallery.

Malargüe Day Parade

The collaboration continued its tradition of participating in the Malargüe Day Parade on November 16. A photo of the event appears in the photo gallery of this report.

Biermann and Medina Tanco Visit Rural School

Peter Biemann reports that he continued a 5-year tradition of visiting a rural boarding school, Escuela 4191 “Dr. Daniel H. Pierini”, located 30 km northeast of Malargüe during the collaboration meeting. Gustavo Medina Tanco accompanies Peter on these visits to translate. Peter’s church in Bonn, Germany, continues to provide yearly support to the school in the form of books and digital equipment. Peter noted certain improvements at the school – cell phone and internet – that help the students stay connected to current events. This is one of many examples of individual collaborators establishing connections with regional schools, an important link between the Observatory and the communities in Mendoza Province.

WBS 9.0 Observatory Operations – (Julio Rodriquez Martino - INFN)

FD shift in October was extremely complicated, mainly due to several power cuts in different buildings. In November the data taking was more stable and no serious problems were found. The weather was generally good, but the seasonal strong wind produced lots of dead time.

A new version of the T3 algorithm was tested during one night (October 28th) with excellent results. It filters quite effectively lightning and noise events. This algorithm is now used as the default since the FD shift starting in December.

The calibration server in Malargüe, where all the calibration data is saved, was off-line for a long period of time. The RAID storage system was unavailable due to problems with several disks, which had to be replaced. It is now back on-line and measures are being taken to back up the data routinely and to copy it to a more widely available location.

Radio Detection R&D – (Ad Van de Berg – KVI)

In the first week of October the initial measurements with the Log-Periodic Dipole Antennae (LPDA) were finalized by the groups from Germany (RWTH/Aachen, FZK-IPE/Karlsruhe, and the Bergische Universität of Wuppertal). Presently the data are being analyzed. In the first week of November, the Dutch team (from IMAPP/Nijmegen, NIKHEF/Nijmegen, and KVI/Groningen) arrived to set up their equipment near the BLS. Using the infrastructure (poles, cables, and mains power at the BLS) initial background measurements were performed with the LPDA's which were then removed and relocated to other poles at a larger distance from the BLS. At these poles the LPDA's will be connected to the Leeds/OSU read-out, which unfortunately arrived very late in November. First measurements by this group will be performed in January next year. Because the LPDA's are vulnerable for strong winds they were strengthened by additional rods connecting all poles pointing towards the same direction (N, S, E, W). The poles close to the BLS, which are cabled to the BLS, have been used to mount the inverted V-shaped dipole antennae from ASTRON, the Netherlands. During November much data have been obtained with these antennae and the high-speed sampling scopes developed by NIKHEF Amsterdam. These antennae are stable against strong winds. We did encounter some problems with the mains power (scheduled power outage and outage caused by thunderstorms). The data are presently being analyzed to study background and possible coincidences with the surface array. In the middle of November, finally, the equipment from the French team (from Subatech Nantes and LPSC Grenoble) arrived on site. As with the shipment from Aachen and OSU, it shows that shipping of equipment into Malargüe is a tedious job, where (long) delays have to be taken into account. Once the equipment had arrived on site, the team from France was able to set up the 6 fat dipole antennae with auxiliary equipment (solar power, wireless data transfer, and front-end read out) at the CLF in a few days. In addition a fence around the antennae stations was mounted to protect them against cattle. Then commissioning could start. All systems near the CLF running, but unexpected RFI was encountered because of the power regulator used. This problem will be solved in the coming months.

During the Auger November meeting it was decided to set up a file server at the Bergische Universität where all radio R&D data will be made available and to use Wiki pages (http://www.augerradio.org) to share information and documentation.

HEAT enhancement -Hans Klages (FZK)

Site: A suitable place for the HEAT telescopes was identified by a surveyor after several visits by myself, Jonny, and Norberto to Coihueco. It is located about 100m straight eastward of the Coihueco building. We have asked for a rectangle of 40 x 25 m there. Norberto and Ingo have started negotiations with the landowners. No show stopper seems to be in sight right now.

HEAT layout : The layout (see attached file) was first discussed with our local Karlsruhe experts for data analysis. We agreed on an azimuthal distance of 45 degree between the telescopes.

This means that at elevations from 29 to about 40 degree there will be short gaps in inclined shower traces. For higher elevations the fields of view of adjacent telescopes will overlap. According to Michael Ungers simulations this is a reasonable solution regarding hybrid efficiency and reconstruction.

Orientation: The orientation of the three telescopes was chosen to be symmetric to the planned infill array of AMIGA. In addition, it enables the easy measurement of the effective telescope resolution in the HEAT "down" position. HEAT 1 coincides then with Coihueco 3, HEAT 3 with Coihueco 6, and HEAT 2 will be on the border of Coihueco 4 and 5.

Power : The power requirements for HEAT have been defined (including electric air conditioning) to be < 20 kW in total.

Telescope enclosures : The construction drawings for the enclosures were finalized shortly before Christmas. The effects of heavy wind load, snow overburden, and earthquakes have been calculated and taken into account. The details of the steel structure of the tilting base plate was accordingly modified. We are ready to contact production companies any time now for quotations.

Tilting mechanics : Following the recommendations of the review panel, the tilting design was modified drastically. The enclosed pdf file shows the new design in a schematic way. Most of the safety issues which came up during the review are solved by this scheme.

HEAT electronics: The hardware development work has been continued by Matthias and his colleagues. Good progress has been made. First examples will be shown on the next meeting.