Speaker
Description
We present the measurement of the cosmic-ray proton spectrum between 54 GeV and 9.5 TeV using 7 years of Pass 8 flight data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). We developed a dedicated proton event selection with an maximum acceptance of 0.25 m^2 sr at 1 TeV. Our analysis yields a large dataset for a spectral measurement with a statistical uncertainty under 1% up to 1 TeV and residual contamination less than 5% from all other cosmic-ray species. We estimate the systematic uncertainties by testing different event selections and different hadronic interaction models for the GEANT4 Monte-Carlo simulations, and we found that they are an order of magnitude larger than the statistical uncertainty. The event selection and spectral measurement of the proton analysis create the opportunity for additional proton analyses with the LAT, such as a dedicated proton anisotropy search.
