AugerPrime: the Pierre Auger Observatory Upgrade

Abstract: The world largest exposure to ultra-high energy cosmic rays accumulated by the Pierre Auger Observatory led to major advances in our understanding of their properties, but the many unknowns about the nature and distribution of the sources, the primary composition and the underlying hadronic interactions prevent the emergence of a uniquely consistent picture. The new perspectives opened by the current results call for an upgrade of the Observatory, whose main aim is the collection of new information about the primary mass of the highest energy cosmic rays on a shower-by-shower basis. The evaluation of the fraction of light primaries in the region of suppression of the flux will open the window to charged particle astronomy, allowing for composition-selected anisotropy searches. In addition, the properties of multiparticle production will be studied at energies not covered by man-made accelerators and new or unexpected changes of hadronic interactions will be searched for. After a discussion of the motivations for upgrading the Pierre Auger Observatory, a description of the detector upgrade is provided. We then discuss the expected performances and the improved physics sensitivity of the upgraded detectors and present the first data collected with the already running Engineering Array.