Hi all,

Tomorrow at 11 am in h320 there will be a seminar by Stephan Schulte, who is interviewing for a post-doc position in our group. Title and abstract are below. I'd appreciate it if you come and ask questions!

best regards, Aart.

Anisotropy Studies with the Pierre Auger Observatory Stephan Schulte - RWTH Aachen University

The Pierre Auger Observatory (PAO) in Malargüe (Argentina) reconstructs the arrival directions and energies of cosmic rays with energies exceeding 10^{18} eV. Under the assumption that the primary particles at the highest energies are only minimally deflected by the intergalactic magnetic field, it can be tested whether their arrival directions overlap with astronomical objects. In this context the PAO has observed a correlation of ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) with nearby active galactic nuclei (AGN). In this talk a complementary approach is chosen. To this end, Autocorrelation methods are studied. They have the advantage of being independent of source and propagation models predicting the distribution of the arrival directions of UHECRs. However, to discover the assets and drawbacks of each method a Monte Carlo study is performed using simulated data sets based on a few of these modes. In the end, we compare the result when applied to data to the one of the catalogue-dependent correlation analysis by using the same event set.