KASCADE-Grande: An overview and first results

The KASCADE-Grande experiment, located at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (Germany), is a multi-component extensive air-shower experiment to study cosmic rays and their interactions at primary energies 1014–1018 eV. After detailed investigations of the knee in the spectrum with KASCADE and EAS-TOP experiments, the main goal of KASCADE-Grande is to provide conclusive results on the knee region by detecting the expected iron knee in the spectrum at around 1017 eV, and measuring the composition in the possible transition region between galactic and extragalactic components. Due to its multi-component characteristics, basically the former KASCADE experiment enriched by two new arrays of scintillator detectors (Grande and Piccolo), with the aim of providing a large acceptance area (0.5 km2) and prompt trigger signal, KASCADE-Grande is a suitable array to provide refined measurements in the 1016–1018 eV region. In the following, we briefly report on the characteristics of the detector, its performance, and first results based on 2 years of data taking.