KASCADE is a European physics experiment started in 1996 at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany (now Karlsruher Institut für Technologie), an extensive air shower experiment array to study the cosmic ray primary composition and the hadronic interactions in the energy range of 1016–1018 eV, measuring simultaneously the electronic, muonic and hadronic components.
Contents
KASCADE-Grande is a further extension of the previous project by reassembling 37 detectors of the former EAS-TOP experiment running between 1987 and 2000 at Campo Imperatore, Gran Sasso Laboratories, Italy.
The experiment uses a CORSIKA simulation program.
Co-located with KASCADE-Grande is the LOPES experiment. LOPES consists of radio antennas and measures the radio emission of extensive air showers.
KASCADE (including all extensions) stopped operation in 2013, but a part of the detectors is still used in other experiments for cosmic-ray air showers, e.g., LOFAR or Tunka.
Results
KASCADE studied heavier components of cosmic rays, finding a "knee" near 80 PeV in 2011, and extending the spectrum measurements to 200PeV.