Auger South Upgrade
Following the short presentations of "new ideas for Auger" at the last November collaboration meeting in Malargüe, intensive discussions have started within the Auger Collaboration on some of the presented topics. Many colleagues have expressed their interest in lowering the energy threshold for a part (O ~ 100 km²) of the detector array of the Auger South experiment to ~ 10**17 eV maintaining the high data quality of hybrid events. It was proposed e.g. to
- study the longitudinal development of the low energy showers using additional FD telescopes (~3) to enlarge the vertical field of view
- increase the surface detector density locally by additional (~100) tanks to reach nearly 100% hybrid efficiency at these energies
- improve the muon detection capabilities in this infill area by large size muon detectors of new design (e.g. scintillation counters)
First rough estimates already show that all these improvements do require serious investments in money and manpower and can probably not be realised by a small subgroup of the Auger collaboration. It is evident that the complete commissioning of the Southern Observatory, which we still hope to reach in the first half of 2006, has first priority. Also, these "new ideas" should not interfere negatively with "Auger North". In fact, such an upgrade will naturally be useful for R&D for the northern experiment.
On the other hand, planning an upgrade and getting the resources requires time.
Our proposal is that all interested parties meet next month in Karlsruhe for an informal discussion of the many topics connected to these ideas.
The meeting should produce substantial results that would be presented at the Auger March meeting and discussions should be continued in Malargüe.