Giovanni Alcocer

Analysis of the Monitoring Data of the Pierre Auger Surface Detector: Data Analysis, Alarms Creation for the Surface Detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory Giovanni Alcocer

The Surface Detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory consists of 1600 water Cherenkov tanks sampling ground particles of air showers produced by energetic cosmc rays. Every water tank is equipped with three photomultipliers (PMTs). Every 7 minutes monitoring data are recording from each surface detector to ensure that they are performing as intended and also to understand the detector behaviour. The monitoring data set is used to study the evolution of parameters of the PMTs as a function of both time and temperature. The main objective of this work is to monitor the stability of the PMTs. In case there is abnormal behaviour detected, an alarm entry is created in the database. The classification of the alarms into different categories, corresponding to the observed patterns of the above mentioned variables and the decision of the alarm level are subject of this research. The research has three important parts, the theoretical analysis about the deflection angle of high energy events and the threshold energy for high energy cosmic rays (GZK cuttof), the theoretical part of the photomultiplers and the analysis of them using C++, Root and MySQL and the alarms creation.