Chicago Air Shower Array

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The Chicago Air Shower Array (CASA) is a very large array of scintillation counters located in Utah, fifty miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Salt Lake City. CASA has been operating since 1992 in coincidence with a second array, the Michigan Anti (MIA), is made of 2500 square meters of buried muon detectors. CASA is the most sensitive experiment built to date in the study of gamma ray and cosmic ray interactions at energies above 100 TeV (10¹⁴ electronvolts or 16 microjoules). Research topics on data from this experiment cover a wide variety of physics issues, including the search for gamma-rays from extragalactic sources (quasars and gamma-ray bursts), the study of diffuse gamma-ray emission from the Galactic plane, and a measurement of the cosmic ray composition in the poorly understood region from 100 to 100,000 TeV.