Graduate Student Seminars

SuperTIGER 2

Nathan Walsh will be talking to us about SuperTIGER-2 and how the experiment is refining our understanding of galactic cosmic ray elemental abundances.

SuperTIGER (Super Trans Iron Galactic Element Recorder) is a cosmic ray detector optimized to measure ultra heavy galactic cosmic rays (with charge Z>26 and energies less than 10^15 eV/nucleon). SuperTIGER launched on a long duration balloon from Williams Field, Antarctica on December 8, 2012 and flew for 55 days at a mean altitude of 125,000 feet, detecting over 50 million cosmic ray nuclei. With the data obtained via satellite telemetry, we were able to measure the elemental abundances of the charge range Z=30-40 (Zn to Zr) with excellent resolution. Furthermore, it was determined that, with more statistics, SuperTIGER could resolve the elements up to Barium (Z=56). A second flight, SuperTIGER-2 (AKA SuperDuperTIGER), was planned for the Austral summer of 2017-18 to obtain additional data but, due to unsatisfactory flight conditions, it was rescheduled to this Austral summer (2018-19). I will share with you our current efforts to push the current SuperTIGER data set to its limit in an attempt to resolve the galactic cosmic ray elemental abundances up to Barium.