Joint analysis of the energy spectrum of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays measured at the Pierre Auger Observatory and the Telescope Array Yoshiki Tsunesada , * on behalf of the Pierre Auger and the Telescope Array Collaboration

The two-spotted spider mite, Tetranychus urticae, usually lives in kin groups under common webs. Because only the first mating results in fertilisation in female T. urticae, adult males guard quiescent deutonymph females, those at the stage immediately before maturation, to ensure paternity. Therefore, the cost of precopulatory guarding time seems considerable for males. Moreover, the fitness indices of daughters from intra-population crosses were significantly lower than those of daughters from inter-population crosses, indicating that inbreeding depression exists in T. urticae. Therefore, we hypothesised that T. urticae males should be choosy in guarding familiar females to avoid inbreeding depression. Furthermore, webs should be a key element of the environment shared by familiar individuals. In this study, we demonstrated the inbreeding avoidance mechanism of T. urticae males in relation to webs produced by familiar females (known webs) or unfamiliar females (unknown webs). Regardless of surrounding webs (known or unknown), males preferred unfamiliar to familiar females. We further examined whether males detect unfamiliar females by their webs. When males had experienced a female's web without encountering that female, they subsequently preferred females that did not produce the surrounding webs in which the choice experiment was conducted. Results suggest that putative kin recognition for inbreeding avoidance in T. urticae males is based on the relationship between webs and females, and not on the discrimination of webs in shared environments.

The sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are still unknown, but assuming standard physics, they are expected to lie within a few hundred megaparsecs from us. Indeed, over cosmological distances cosmic rays lose energy to interactions with background photons, at a rate depending on their mass number and energy and properties of photonuclear interactions and photon backgrounds. The universe is not homogeneous at such scales, hence the distribution of the arrival directions of cosmic rays is expected to reflect the inhomogeneities in the distribution of galaxies; the shorter the energy loss lengths, the stronger the expected anisotropies. Galactic and intergalactic magnetic fields can blur and distort the picture, but the magnitudes of the largest-scale anisotropies, namely the dipole and quadrupole moments, are the most robust to their effects. Measuring them with no bias regardless of any higher-order multipoles is not possible except with full-sky coverage. In this work, we achieve this in three energy ranges (approximately 8-16 EeV, 16-32 EeV, and 32-∞ EeV) by combining surface-detector data collected at the Pierre Auger Observatory until 2020 and at the Telescope Array (TA) until 2019, before the completion of the upgrades of the arrays with new scintillator detectors. We find that the full-sky coverage achieved by combining Auger and TA data reduces the uncertainties on the north-south components of the dipole and quadrupole in half compared to Auger-only results.

Rubtsov a on behalf of the Telescope Array Collaboration †

Telescope Array (TA) is the largest ultrahigh energy cosmic-ray (UHECR) observatory in the Northern Hemisphere. A surface detector (SD) array covers approximately 700 km 2 , and the SD array is surrounded by three fluorescence detector (FD) stations. TA has found evidence for a cluster of cosmic rays with energies greater than 57 EeV from the TA SD data. In order to confirm this evidence with more data, we started the TAx4 experiment which expands the detection area using new SDs and FDs. We started construction of new SDs which are arranged in a square grid with 2.08 km spacing at the north east and south east of the TA SD array. More than half of the new SDs are already deployed and running. We present the current status of the TAx4 SD, trigger efficiency and exposure prospects for the highest energy part of the cosmic ray spectrum.