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After its successful campaign of measurements beyond the Polar Arctic Circle, the PolarquEEEst experiment measured the cosmic charged particle rate at sea level in a latitude interval between 35$$^{\\circ }$$∘ N and 82$$^{\\circ }$$∘ N. In this paper, these measurements are described and the corresponding results are discussed.

Since 2019, three scintillator-based cosmic ray detectors, readout by SiPM and controlled by low-cost electronics, are installed in the scientific research site in Ny Ålesund (Svalbard) at 79°N, recording muons from secondary cosmic rays. The detectors are part of the EEE Project, a joint project of Centrofermi and INFN, involving almost 100 secondary schools in Italy. After collecting nearly 5 years of data, we were able to analyse the muon rate time series and observe an evident oscillating component with a period of about one year. Applying the Lomb-Scargle periodogram technique, based on sinusoidal fit optimization, we could quantify the annual component, after verifying its independence from environmental and experimental factors.

The Extreme Energy Events Project is an educational and scientific initiative lead by the Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche Enrico Fermi (CREF) and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), two research Institutions under the control of the Italian Ministero dell’Universit`a e Ricerca (MUR). The EEE Project studies cosmic rays by means of a series of detectors located inside Italian high schools or INFN/University laboratories. The detectors have been built and are operated with the strong cooperation of students and teachers. Data from the different EEE detectors are centrally collected, reconstructed, and analyzed for scientific publications. However, they are also distributed to the students, who actively participate in the study of the properties of the muon flux and present their work at general meetings organized both online or in-person. It is important to underline that the Project involves the student during an entire year (and sometimes even more) allowing a continuous interaction with the researchers involved. A description of the outreach activities and of their impact on the students’ learning curve will be provided, together with a few examples of activities that led to students-signed publications.

The whole Extreme Energy Events (EEE) array is composed of 61 telescopes installed in Italian High Schools, built and operated by students and teachers, constantly supervised by researchers. The muon telescope of the EEE Project is made by 3 Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPC). The unconventional working sites are a unique test field for checking the robustness and the low-ageing features of the MRPC technology for particle tracking and timing purposes. The MRPCs are fluxed with a standard mixture (98% C 2 H 2 F 4 - 2% SF 6 ) of greenhouse gases (GHG) phasing out of production. The EEE Collaboration is currently studying alternative mixtures environmentally and economically sustainable. The EEE Collaboration actions to reduce the Global Warming Potential (GWP) in the MRPC array of the EEE experiment are progressing.

The Extreme Energy Events (EEE) experiment consists in a network of cosmic muon tracker telescopes, each made of three Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPC), able to precisely measure the absolute muon crossing time and the muon integrated angular flux at the ground level. To investigate the MRPC telescope response and performance, a simulation tool was developed in GEMC, software package based on GEANT4 libraries. The framework was validated by comparing simulations with the EEE experimental data. Detailed description of telescope response is fundamental to carry on the physics program of the EEE project, and it could open other research avenues, such as using the telescope in combination with other detectors to perform a (muon) tomography of material surrounding the telescope. In this paper, the EEE simulation framework will be presented reporting results and discussing further applications.

. A search for long distance correlations between individual Extensive Air Showers (EAS) detected by pairs of MRPC telescopes of the Extreme Energy Events (EEE) network was carried out. The search for an anomaly in these events is the purpose of our work. A dataset obtained by all the possible 45 pairs between 10 EEE cluster sites (hosting at least two telescopes), located at relative distances between 86 and 1200km, was analyzed, corresponding to an overall period of 3968 days time exposure. To estimate the possible event excess with respect to the spurious rate, the number of coincidence events was extracted as a function of the time difference between the arrival of the showers in the two sites, from ± 10 s to the smallest time interval where events are still observed. The analysis was done taking into account both the time and orientation correlation between the showers detected by the telescope pairs. A few candidate events with unusually small time difference and angular distance were observed, with a p-value sensibly smaller than a confidence level of 0.05.

The Extreme Energy Events experiment (EEE) is a cosmic ray observatory made of about 60 muon telescopes based on Multigap Resistive Plate Chamber (MRPC) detectors. The EEE experiment has two main targets: a scientific and a dissemination. The EEE collaboration has also developed a large set of portable scintillator-based detectors, named Cosmic Box (CB), mainly used for educational purposes. The CB allows students to perform cosmic ray counting measurements in several environments. CBs are made of two 15 × 15 × 1 cm scintillators read by two 3 × 3 mm 2 SiPMs operated in coincidence. Three CBs were deployed in Nuraxi Figus and Seruci coal mine to perform an underground measurement of the cosmic muon flux attenuation. High school and university students were directly involved in all the stages of the measurements: from the preliminary measurements to the on-site work and data analysis.

The PolarquEEEst scientific programme consists in a series of measurements of the cosmic ray flux up to the highest latitudes. It started in Summer 2018, when three telescopes made out of scintillators readout by SiPMs were built and installed in Italy, Norway and on a sailboat leaving from North Island, to circumnavigate the Svalbard archipelago and land in Tromsø. They collected data on a latitude range from 44° N up to 82° N, with a dense sampling of the Northernmost interval. The PolarquEEEst mission continued afterwards with a series of measurements in Italy, Southward reaching Lampedusa, and in Germany. In May 2019 the PolarquEEEst collaboration accomplished another important result, installing a cosmic ray observatory for the detection of secondary cosmic muons at Ny Alesund, at 79° N, made of three independent identical detectors positioned a few hundred meters from each other, and synchronized in order to operate together as a network. The configuration used will allow high precision measurements never performed before at these latitudes on a long term, also interesting for their connection with environmental phenomena. The network will also complement the existing stations for the detection of cosmic neutrons at the Svalbard archipelago, enlarging by far the physics scope that is possible to pursue in this field at this peculiar location. Here the various missions are presented, and some preliminary results from the measurements performed are shown.

A simulation tool based on GEMC framework to describe the MRPC telescope of the Extreme Energy Events (EEE) Project is presented. The EEE experiment is mainly devoted to the study of the secondary cosmic muons by using MRPC telescope distributed in high schools and research centres in Italy and at CERN. This takes into account the muon interactions with EEE telescopes and the structures surrounding the experimental apparata; it consists of a dedicated event generator producing realistic muon distribution and a detailed geometry description of the detector. Microscopic behaviour of MRPCs has been included to produce experimental-like data. A method to estimate the chamber efficiency directly from data has been implemented and tested by comparing the experimental and simulated polar angle distribution of muons.

Cosmic ray muons are a penetrating component of extensive air showers created in the Earth atmosphere by the interaction of highly energetic primary particles, mostly protons, which continuously bombard our Planet. The secondary cosmic radiation is the result of the complex interplay between the production cross section and the interaction mechanisms with the atmosphere (including the energy loss, multiple scattering and particle decay). Cosmic muons have been considered since several decades as a powerful probe to exploit our environment, from muography of volcanoes to absorption radiography of possible hidden rooms inside large structures, such as Pyramids, to the detection of high-Z illicit nuclear materials inside containers and many other applications of social interest. This paper discusses the possibility to employ the Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPC) of the Extreme Energy Events (EEE) Project as muon tracking detectors to monitor the long term stability of civil buildings and structures when used in conjunction with additional detectors. For this application the average direction of the cosmic muon tracks passing through the MRPC telescope and an additional detector located some distance apart in the same building may be reconstructed with good precision and any small variation over long time acquisition periods may be monitored. The performance of such setup is discussed and experimental results from first coincidence measurements obtained with a 40 × 60 cm2 scintillator detector operated in the same building with one of the EEE telescopes, at about 15 m vertical distance from it, are presented. Simple Monte Carlo and GEANT simulations were also carried out to evaluate typical acceptance values for the operating conditions employed so far, to extrapolate to other geometrical configurations, and to evaluate multiple scattering effects.