Ponente
Descripción
Recent high-precision measurements of cosmic rays have revealed spectral features that are not justified by a simple power-law behavior. These deviations provide valuable insights into cosmic ray acceleration, propagation, and injection mechanisms, including possible contributions from nearby sources. Among the various cosmic ray species, protons—being the most abundant and least charged nuclei—serve as a key probe for testing these theoretical scenarios due to the reduced complexity in modeling their acceleration and propagation. In this study, we present a measurement of the cosmic-ray proton spectrum in the 1–500 TeV energy range, derived from archival MAGIC data originally collected for gamma-ray observations. The analysis is based on neural networks for both energy reconstruction and event classification. Notably, this represents the first measurement of the proton spectrum in this wide energy range using the ground-based imaging atmospheric Cherenkov technique. The results provide a complementary perspective to space-based experiments and contribute to a more complete understanding of cosmic-ray spectra at the highest energies accessible with current instrumentation.
