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Studies Of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays, John Douglas Hague

Physics & Astronomy ETDs

In this thesis, analysis tools for understanding the observed spectrum and arrival directions of ultra high energy cosmic rays are developed and applied to both simulated and observed data. Two separate statistical tests are applied to the AGASA and preliminary Auger Cosmic Ray Energy spectra in an attempt to find deviation from a pure power-law. The first test is constructed from the probability distribution for the maximum event of a sample drawn from a power-law. The second employs the TP-statistic, a function defined to deviate from zero when the sample deviates from the power-law form, regardless of the value of …