Previous EAS investigations have shown that the charged particle density becomes independent of the primary mass at large but fixed distances from the shower core and that it can be used as an estimator for the primary energy. The particular radial distance from the shower axis where this effect takes place is dependent on the detector layout. For the KASCADE-Grande experiment, simulation studies have shown it to be around 500 m. A notation S(500) is used for the charged particle density at this specific distance. We present results on the reconstruction of the primary energy spectrum of cosmic rays from the experimentally recorded S(500) observable using the KASCADE-Grande array. The constant intensity cut (C1C) method is applied to evaluate the attenuation of the S(500) observable with the zenith angle. A correction is subsequently applied to correct all recorded S(500) values for attenuation. The all event S(500) spectrum is obtained. A calibration of S(500) values with the primary energy has been worked out by simulations and has been used for conversion thus obtaining the primary energy spectrum (in the energy range accessible to the KASCADE-Grande array of 10(16)-10(18) eV). An evaluation of systematic uncertainties induced by different sources is also given.

The properties of galactic cosmic rays are investigated with the KASCADE-Grande experiment in the energy range between $10^{14}$ and $10^{18}$ eV. Recent results are discussed. They concern mainly the all-particle energy spectrum and the elemental composition of cosmic rays.

The extensive air shower experiment KASCADE-Grande (KArlsruhe Shower Core and Array DEtector and Grande array) is located on site of the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in Germany. The original KASCADE experiment consisted of a densely packed scintillator array with unshielded and shielded detectors for the measurement of the electromagnetic and muonic shower component independently, as well as muon tracking devices and a hadron calorimeter. The Grande array as an extension of KASCADE consists of 37 scintillation detector stations covering an area of 700×700 m 2 . The main goal for the combined measurements of KASCADE and Grande is the investigation of the energy spectrum and composition of primary cosmic rays in the energy range of 10 16 to 10 18 eV. In this paper an overview of the KASCADE-Grande experiment and recent results will be presented.

KASCADE-Grande is an extensive air shower array co-located with the original KASCADE air shower experiment at Forschungszentrum. Karlsruhe, Germany. The multi-detector system allows to investigate the energy spectrum, composition, and anisotropies of cosmic rays in the energy range extended up to 10(18) eV. An overview on the performance of the apparatus and first results are presented.

KASCADE-Grande is an extensive air shower experiment at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany. Mails parts of the experiment are the Grande array spread over all area of 700 x 700 m(2), the original KASCADE array covering 200 x 200 m2 with unshielded and shielded detectors, and additional moon tracking devices. This multi-detector system allows to investigate the energy spectrum, composition, and anisotropies of cosmic rays in the energy range up to 1 EeV. An overview on the performance of the apparatus and first results will be given.

The Muon Tracking Detector in the KASCADE-Grande EAS experiment allows the precise measurement of shower muon directions up to 700 m distance from the shower center. This directional information is used to study the pseudorapidity of muons in EAS, closely related to the pseudorapidity of their parent mesons. Moreover, the mean value of muon pseudorapidity in a registered shower reflects the longitudinal development of its hadronic component. All of this makes it a good tool for testing hadronic interaction models. The possibilities of such tests given by the KASCADE-Grande experimental setup are discussed and an example of the obtained muon pseudorapidity spectrum is shown.

LOPES is a radio antenna array co-located with the Karlsruhe Shower Core and Array DEtector, KASCADE–Grande in Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany, which provides well-calibrated trigger information and air shower parameters for primary energies up to 1018eV. By the end of 2006, the radio antennas were re-configured to perform polarization measurements of the radio signal of cosmic ray air showers, recording in the same time both, the East–West and North–South polarization directions of the radio emission. The main goal of these measurements is to reconstruct the polarization characteristics of the emitted signal. This will allow a detailed comparison with theoretical predictions. The current status of these measurements is reported here.

Cosmic rays are energetic particles from outside the earth’s atmosphere. When a high energy cosmic ray hits the atmosphere it triggers a cascade of secondary particles produced in nuclear interactions, an air shower. Up to now the established methods of measuring air showers are detection of the particles that reach the ground level or optical observation of the Cherenkov or fluorescent light.

The antenna is the key component for radio detection of cosmic air showers. For large-scale radio detector arrays we designed a crossed polarized short aperiodic loaded loop antenna (SALLA) with only 100 cm diameter, less than 2 kg weight and material cost of about 60 Euro. It is a special type of the well-known Beverage antennas. The E-plane and H-plane directional diagram features a wide main lobe towards zenith with a 3 dB beam width of 150°. SALLA systematically uses internal losses by resistor loading and their sensitivity reaches the theoretical limit given by the omnipresent galactic noise. In return SALLA has in comparison to dipoles and other standard antennas the widest main lobe, the lowest calibration uncertainty, dispersion, weight, material costs, and production time, the smallest dimension, and the highest robustness. SALLA has practically the same directional sensitivity in the E- and H-plane. Thus the sensitivity is rotational invariant. The properties of this new antenna including its delay and transfer function are given.

In the present study, we analyze the radio signal from inclined air showers recorded by LOPES-30 in coincidence with KASCADE-Grande. LOPES-30 consists of 30 East-West oriented digital antennas, which are amplitude calibrated by an external source.Radio emission from air showers is considered a geomagnetic effect. Inclined events provide a larger range of values for geomagnetic angle (angle between shower axis and geomagnetic field direction) than vertical showers and thus more information on the emission processes can be gathered.In order to have the geometry of the air shower we use the reconstruction provided by the KASCADE-Grande particle detectors array. Analyzing events observed by both LOPES and the extended part of the KASCADE array, Grande, gives the possibility to test in particular the capability and efficiency of radio detection of more distant events. The results are compared with a previous analysis of inclined events recorded by the initial 10 antenna set-up, LOPES-10, in coincidence with the Grande array. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

When ultra high energy cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, they produce a shower of millions of secondary particles. Thereby the charged particles in the shower emit a radio pulse whilst deflected in the Earth's magnetic field. LOPES is a digital antenna array measuring these radio pulses in the frequency range from 40 to 80 MHz. It is located at the site of and triggered by the air shower experiment KASCADE-Grande at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. In its present configuration, it consists of 15 east–west-polarized and 15 north–south-polarized, absolutely calibrated short dipole antennas, as well as 10 LPDAs (with two channels each). Furthermore, it serves as a test bench for technological developments, like new antenna types or a radio-based self-triggering (LOPESSTAR). To achieve a good angular reconstruction and to digitally form a beam into the arrival direction of the shower, it has a precise time calibration.

The KASCADE-Grande experiment, located at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (Germany) is a multi-component extensive air-shower experiment devoted to the study of cosmic rays and their interactions at primary energies 10 14 - 10 18 eV. One of the main goals of the experiment is the measurement of the all particle energy spectrum in the 10 16 - 10 18 eV region. For this analysis the Grande detector samples the charged component of the air shower while the KASCADE array provides a measurement of the muon component. An independent fit of the lateral distributions of charged particle and muon densities allows to extract the charged particle and muon sizes of the shower. The size of the charged particles, combined with the ratio between charged particle and muon sizes, which is used to take into account shower-to-shower fluctuations, is used to assign the energy on an event-by-event basis, in the framework of the CORSIKA-QGSjetII model. The method itself, and the energy spectrum derived with this technique are presented.

A large area (128m(2)) Muon Tracking Detector (MTD), located within the KASCADE experiment, has been built with the aim to identify muons (E-mu >0.8GeV) and their directions in extensive air showers by track measurements under snore than 18 r.l. shielding. The orientation of the muon track with respect to the shower axis is expressed in terms of the radial- and tangential angles. By means of triangulation the muon production height H-mu is determined. By means of H-mu a transition from light: to heavy cosmic ray primary particles with increasing shower energy E-o from 1-10 PeV is observed.

Previous EAS investigations have shown that the charged particle density becomes independent of the primary mass at certain distances froth the shower core and can be used as an estimator for the primary energy. In the context of the KASCADE-Grande experiment, the particular distance to shower core at which this effect takes place is around 500 m, hence the study at this particular distance and the notation S(500) for the charged particle density. It has been shown that S(500) maps the primary energy. We present results of further investigations in this direction. Art attenuation correction function can be derived from the S(500) attenuation with the EAS angle of incidence, allowing us to build an all event S(500) spectrum. In view of a future conversion of the recorded S(500) spectrum to the primary energy, based on simulations a calibration of the observed S(500) values with the primary energies has been worked out (in the energy range accessible to the KASCADE-Grande array, 10(16)-10(18) eV).

In a large scale antenna array for the radio detection of cosmic rays the trigger mechanism is one of the key features. While calling for a low trig- ger threshold for best event acceptance, the trigger rate of each station must be low enough to allow for the limited capacity of wireless communications. Additionally a low power consumption is required, as the stations will be solar powered. We have developed a trigger algorithm realized in FPGA-hardware which provides an RFI-suppression by Fourier transforming the radio signal live to frequency domain, eliminating mono-frequent car- riers and transforming back to time domain. This improves the signal to noise ratio by a factor of 2. Then a threshold is applied and cuts on particular pulse shape parameters are performed to further reduce the trigger rate. Finally the coincidence be- tween neighboring antennas is built, and the event is read out. The current status of the hardware development and first results of test measurements with 3 prototype antennas is presented.

The lateral distributions of EAS particles are affected by various kinds of azimuthal asymmetries, which arise from different effects: Geometric effects of mapping the horizontal plane observations onto the shower plane, different attenuation of particles on different sides of inclined EAS and the influence of the geomagnetic field on the particle movement. A procedure is described of minimizing the effects of azimuthal asymmetries of lateral density distributions. It is demonstrated and discussed in context of practical cases of data reconstruction by KASCADE-Grande.

KASCADE-Grande is an extensive air-shower experiment located at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany. Main parts of the experiment axe the Grande array spread over an area of 700 x 700 m(2), the original KASCADE array covering 200 x 200 m(2) with unshielded and shielded detectors, and additional muon tracking devices. This multi-detector system allows to investigate the energy spectrum, composition, and anisotropies of cosmic rays in the energy range up to 1 EeV. LOPES is co-located at the same site to measure radio pulses from extensive air showers in coincidence with KASCADE-Grande. It consists of 30 digital antennas operated in different geometrical configurations. Read out is performed at high bandwidths and rate data, processing with the aim to calibrate the emitted signal in the primary energy range or 10(16) - 10(18) eV by making use of reconstructed air-shower observables of KASCADE-Grande. An overview on the performance of both experiments will be given and recent; analysis results be reported.

LOPES measures radio pulses from extensive air showers and aims to calibrate the emitted signal in the primary energy range of 10(16) - 10(18) eV. LOPES, a digital radio interferometer using high bandwidths and fast data processing, is set up at the location of tire KASCADE-Grande extensive air shower experiment in Karlsruhe, Germany and profits from the reconstructed air shower observables of KASCADE-Grande. We report about recent analysis results of the radio signals measured by LOPES.

14 KASCADE-Grande reports submitted to the 31st International Cosmic Ray Conference, Lodz, Poland, July 2009