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Nowadays experiments

Note

Lattes’ work in Berkeley showed that the exploration of elementary particles did not restrict itself to measurements of cosmic ray interactions. From the 1950s forward, particle accelerators heavily started to function, allowing scientists to develop new detectors and new high-statistical data acquisition systems. All while having control of the types of primary particles and defined energies, as occurs today with LHC’s experiments.

In the last decades, massive progress in elementary particle physics happened through instruments developed and improved for experiments with cosmic particles and, later, also for accelerators. Some of these instruments are electrometers, cloud chambers, Geiger-Müller counters, coincidence circuits, photographic emulsions, scintillators, Cherenkov radiation detectors, calorimeters, and trace detectors. Despite the scientific knowledge advance due to this progress, many cosmological questions still require answers:

  • What is the source of cosmic rays?
  • What is releasing highly energetic particles through the universe?
    • Would the source be a cosmic explosion extremely powerful and unknown?
    • Or is it a huge black hole that sucks stars until they die violently?
    • Or is it from galaxies in collision?
  • Can cosmic rays give us an answer about dark matter’s nature?
  • Do cosmic rays influence cloud formation and climatic conditions in general?
  • What is the fraction of antimatter particles in primary radiation?

To answer these questions and many other mysteries, global collaborations of astroparticle physics have been created, and bigger, more sensible experiments are in the making. Among the countless efforts over more than 100 years of cosmic rays discovery, we can mention the most recent ones: