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CHICOS Project Overview

The CHICOS project, operated by the Kellogg Laboratory at Caltech, represents a unique blending of cutting-edge scientific research and broadly-based educational outreach. CHICOS is an active research array for the detection of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. The array as presently deployed has already seen extended air showers, and the soon-to-be-completed CHICOS 90 array will observe with large aperture in the energy range from 1018 to 1021 eV, with the angular resolution to address questions of clustering in several years of run time. The events CHICOS is designed to observe are single subatomic particles slamming into the Earth's atmosphere with the energy of a brick falling from a rooftop. These ultra-high energy cosmic rays, or UHECRs, interact with the atmosphere to produce large showers of secondary particles at the surface of the Earth. Detection of UHECRs therefore depends on an array of particle sensors deployed like a net over many square kilometers to catch the incoming shower. In the CHICOS project, schools across the Los Angeles area provide the "net" of detector sites with ready-made infrastructure and a valuable population of teachers and students who participate in the project.

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