Tunka experiment

The Tunka experiment now named TAIGA (Tunka Advanced Instrument for cosmic ray physics and Gamma Astronomy) measures air showers, which are initiated by charged cosmic rays or high energy gamma rays. TAIGA is situated in Siberia in the Tunka valley close to lake Baikal. Meanwhile, TAIGA consists of five different detector systems: Tunka-133, Tunka-Rex, and Tunka-Grande for charged cosmic rays; Tunka-HiSCORE and Tunka-IACT for gamma astronomy. From the measurements of each detector it is possible to reconstruct the arrival direction, energy and type of the cosmic rays, where the accuracy is enhanced by the combination of different detector systems.

The aim of the cosmic-ray measurements is to solve the question of the origin of the cosmic rays in the energy range up to about 1 EeV. Thus, the Tunka experiment explores the same energy range as the KASCADE-Grande cosmic-ray experiment at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and as the surface detector IceTop of the IceCube experiment at South Pole. However, the first detector of TAIGA, Tunka-133, uses a different and independent measurement technique, which can be used to cross-check the results by the other experiments. For gamma-ray astronomy the aim is to identify sources of higher energy than possible by current gamma-ray observatories.