Performance of the Tibet hybrid experiment (YAC-II + Tibet-III + MD) to measure the energy spectra of the light primary cosmic rays at energies 50–10,000 TeV

A new hybrid detector system has been constructed by the Tibet ASγ collaboration at Tibet, China, since 2014 to measure the chemical composition of cosmic rays around the knee in the wide energy range. They consist of an air-shower-core detector-grid (YAC-II) to detect high energy electromagnetic component, the Tibet air-shower array (Tibet-III) and a large underground water-Cherenkov muon-detector array (MD). We have carried out a detailed air-shower Monte Carlo (MC) simulation to study the performance of the hybrid detectors by using CORSIKA (version 6.204), which includes QGSJET01c and SIBYLL2.1 hadronic interaction models. Assumed primary cosmic ray models are based on helium poor, helium rich and Gaisser’s fit compositions around the knee. All detector responses are calculated using Geant4 (version 9.5) according to the real detector configurations and the MC events are reconstructed by the same procedure as the experimental data analysis. The energy determination is made by lateral density fitting (LDF) method using modified NKG function and the separation of the light components (proton, helium) is made by means of the artificial neural network (ANN) method and the random forest (RF) method. The systematic errors of the spectra of proton and helium caused by each steps of the analysis procedure are investigated including the dependence of the MC data on the hadronic interaction models and the primary composition models, and the algorithms for the primary mass identification. The systematic errors of the flux to be obtained by the new experiment are summarized as less than 30% in total. Our results show that the new hybrid experiment is powerful enough to study the chemical composition of the cosmic rays, in particular, to obtain the light-component spectra of the primary cosmic rays in 50–10,000 TeV energy range overlapping to the direct observation data at low energy side and ground-based indirect observations at high energy side. It is possible in this energy range to find the break points of the power indices of proton and helium (the knee of individual component spectrum) which are basically important parameter for the study of the cosmic-ray origin.