The KASCADE-Grande Experiment at KIT Campus North, Karlsruhe / Germany

The Research Subject

KASCADE-Grande is an extensive air shower experiment array to study the cosmic ray primary composition and the hadronic interactions in the energy range E₀=10¹⁶-10¹⁸eV.

The experiment is situated on site of the former Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (49,1°N, 8,4°O) at 110m a.s.l, corresponding to an average athmospheric depth of 1022g/cm². It measures simultaneously the electromagnetic, muonic and hadronic componenets of extensive air showers of cosmic rays.

As an extension of the former KASCADE experiment running successfully since 1996, KASCADE-Grande was built by reassembling 37 stations of the former EAS-TOP experiment -basically the electromagnetic detectors- running between 1987 and 2000 at Campo Imperatore, Grand Sasso Loboratories, Italy.

One of the main results obtained by these two experiments is a picture of increasingly heavier composition above the 'knee' caused by a break in the spectrum of the light components. Conventional acceleration models predict a change of the composition towards heavier components. The discovery of the knee in the heavy components, represented by iron, would be a convincing verification of these theories. From the observed rigidity dependent breaks of the spectra of different lighter primaries observed between 10¹⁴ and 10¹⁶eV, the iron 'knee' is expected around E₀=10¹⁷eV.

consists of 10 institutes in 8 countries.
The list of the members of the KASCADE-Grande collaboration is available here.

The KASCADE-Grande Experiment

The original KASCADE Array is a Scintillator Array which measures the electrons, photons and muons of extensive air showers outside the core region in 252 detector stations on a rectangular grid of 13 m spacing, hence forming an array of 200 x 200 m².

The key component of the Central Detector is a finely segmented Hadron Clorimeter .
A 20 x 16 m² iron stack arranged in 9 horizontal layers of 11 nuclear interaction length is equipped with 10808 ionisation chambers filled with Tetramethylsilane (TMS) or Tetramethylpentane (TMP) respectively working at room temperature. Each chamber has 4 readout electrodes, thus the energy release of hadrons is measured in more than 43000 electronic channels. Below 30 radiation length of absorber the central calorimeter contains a layer of 456 scintillation detectors acting as Trigger for the calorimeter and measuring the arrival time of hadrons. Underneath the calorimeter two layers of Multi Wire Proportional Chambers measure muon tracks above an energy of 2 GeV with about 1.0 ^o angular accuracy.

A Muon Tracking Detector is located north of the Central Detector. In a 50 m long tunnel muons above an energy threshold of 0.8 GeV are measured with Streamer Tubes. On an active area of 128 m² muons are tracked with an accuracy of 0.5°.

The KASCADE-Grande Detector Array has been realized by means of 37 stations at a mutual distance of about 130 m covering an area of 0.5 km² next to the KASCADE site in order to operate jointly with the KASCADE detector components. Each KASCADE-Grande array station is equipped with 10 m² of scintillation counters and the electronic components to generate a trigger signal and for calibration purposes. A central data acquisition station (DAQ) collects the data from all stations and generates a vaild experiment trigger.

The KASCADE-Piccolo Trigger Array consists of an array of 8 stations equipped with 10m² of plastic scintillator each and is placed towards the center of the Grande array. The main aim of piccolo is to provide an external trigger to Grande and to KASCADE for coincidence events.

On March, 30^st 2009 KASCADE-Grande was officially shut down with a big symposium at Forschungszentrum Karsruhe. Some components of KASCADE-Grande are still running serving as a test facility for the Radio Antenna Array LOPES and some other test setups (HISPARC, TAUWER , Lightning Mapping Array LMA) using the advantage of a well calibrated Air Shower experiment.

Responsible for this page wochele@kit.edu,      KIT-CN 23938     update : 3.5.2012