arXiv subjects

Hernán Asorey

Publications and source records attributed to Hernán Asorey.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Water Cherenkov Detectors in Precision Agriculture: A Novel Approach for High-Resolution Soil Moisture Monitoring

Water Cherenkov Detectors (WCDs), traditionally employed in cosmic-ray detection, are repurposed here for precision soil moisture monitoring using cosmic-ray neutron sensing. This approach offers advantages over conventional neutron probes, including enhanced sensitivity to low moisture levels and the ability to cover larger soil volumes without subsurface intrusion. This study evaluates the feasibility of WCDs for agricultural neutron hydrometry, addressing challenges such as background suppression and data interpretation in heterogeneous soils. We present experimental results from controlled wet and dry soil-condition emulations, alongside Monte Carlo simulations using Geant4 with an atmospheric neutron spectrum to correlate signal variation with soil-moisture differences. By bridging particle physics and agronomy, WCDs could advance soil moisture monitoring, offering a non-invasive, scalable, and accurate alternative for optimizing agricultural water use. Preliminary findings suggest a transformative potential for sustainable farming, though further research is needed to enhance cost-efficiency and adaptability to diverse soil types.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2026

Two-Stage Gamma-Neutron Source Classification in Water Cherenkov Detectors: Energy Threshold Screening and Machine Learning Pulse Analysis

Water Cherenkov detectors offer a robust and economical solution for real-time radiation monitoring by detecting Cherenkov light from charged particles moving faster than light in water. This work presents a novel two-stage classification framework for gamma-neutron discrimination: an initial physics-based energy threshold filters unambiguous low-energy gamma sources, followed by a machine learning ensemble that resolves ambiguities at higher energies. The detector response was characterized using $^{60}$Co (1.17/1.33~MeV), $^{137}$Cs (0.66~MeV), and a shielded $^{241}$AmBe source, with lead, paraffin, and cadmium shielding employed to isolate neutron and gamma interactions. Energy calibration established a linear ADU to MeV conversion ($R^2 = 0.966$), enabling identification of a neutron detection threshold at $2.62 \pm 0.77$~MeV via a $3σ$ significance analysis. Stage one categorizes sources as pure gamma (below threshold) or neutron-emitting (at threshold). For ambiguous cases above threshold, a machine learning pipeline utilizing pulse shape analysis was developed. A soft voting ensemble (Bagging, CatBoost, and MLP) achieved an accuracy of 0.816 and an AUC of 0.921. This hybrid scheme combines physics-based filtering with ML refinement, offering an interpretable and scalable solution for nuclear security, nonproliferation monitoring, and fundamental radiation research.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2026

Driving Computational Efficiency in Large-Scale Platforms using HPC Technologies

The Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO) project utilizes extensive High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources for complex astroparticle physics simulations, making resource efficiency critical for scientific productivity and sustainability. This article presents a detailed analysis focused on quantifying and improving HPC resource utilization efficiency specifically within the LAGO computational environment. The core objective is to understand how LAGO's distinct computational workloads-characterized by a prevalent coarse-grained, task-parallel execution model-consume resources in practice. To achieve this, we analyze historical job accounting data from the EGI FedCloud platform, identifying primary workload categories (Monte Carlo simulations, data processing, user analysis/testing) and evaluating their performance using key efficiency metrics (CPU utilization, walltime utilization, and I/O patterns). Our analysis reveals significant patterns, including high CPU efficiency within individual simulation tasks contrasted with the distorting impact of short test jobs on aggregate metrics. This work pinpoints specific inefficiencies and provides data-driven insights into LAGO's HPC usage. The findings directly inform recommendations for optimizing resource requests, refining workflow management strategies, and guiding future efforts to enhance computational throughput, ultimately maximizing the scientific return from LAGO's HPC investments.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

Calculation of the High-Energy Neutron Flux for Anticipating Errors and Recovery Techniques in Exascale Supercomputer Centres

The age of exascale computing has arrived and the risks associated with neutron and other atmospheric radiation are becoming more critical as the computing power increases, hence, the expected Mean Time Between Failures will be reduced because of this radiation. In this work, a new and detailed calculation of the neutron flux for energies above 50 MeV is presented. This has been done by using state-of-the-art Monte Carlo astroparticle techniques and including real atmospheric profiles at each one of the next 23 exascale supercomputing facilities. Atmospheric impact in the flux and seasonal variations were observed and characterised, and the barometric coefficient for high-energy neutrons at each site was obtained. With these coefficients, potential risks of errors associated with the increase in the flux of energetic neutrons, such as the occurrence of single event upsets or transients, and the corresponding failure-in-time rates, can be anticipated just by using the atmospheric pressure before the assignation of resources to critical tasks at each exascale facility. For more clarity, examples about how the rate of failures is affected by the cosmic rays are included, so administrators will better anticipate which more or less restrictive actions could take for overcoming errors.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

The ARTI Framework: Cosmic Rays Atmospheric Background Simulations

ARTI is a complete framework designed to simulate the signals produced by the secondary particles emerging from the interaction of single, multiple and even, the complete flux of primary cosmic rays with the atmosphere. These signals are simulated for any particle detector located at any place (latitude, longitude and altitude), including the real-time atmospheric, geomagnetic and detector conditions. Formulated through a sequence of codes written in C++, Fortran, Bash and Perl, it provides an easy-to-use integration of three different simulation environments: magnetocosmic, CORSIKA and Geant4. These tools evaluate the geomagnetic field effects on the primary flux, the atmospheric showers of cosmic rays and the detectors' response to the secondary flux of particles. In this work, we exhibit the usage of the ARTI framework by calculating the total expected flux of signals at eight selected sites of the Latin American Giant Observatory, a cosmic ray Observatory located in Latin America covering a wide range altitudes, latitudes and geomagnetic rigidities. ARTI also calculates the flux of signals expected during the sudden occurrence of a gamma-ray burst or the flux of energetic photons originating in steady gamma sources. It also compares these fluxes with the expected background to detect these phenomena in a single water Cherenkov detector deployed in high altitude sites. Even more, by using ARTI, it is possible to calculate in a very precise way the expected flux of high energetic muons and other secondaries on the ground and to inject it over a geological structure for muography applications.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2022

A survey of the European Open Science Cloud services for expanding the capacity and capabilities of multidisciplinary scientific applications

Open Science is a paradigm in which scientific data, procedures, tools and results are shared transparently and reused by society as a whole. The initiative known as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is an effort in Europe to provide an open, trusted, virtual and federated computing environment to execute scientific applications, and to store, share and re-use research data across borders and scientific disciplines. Additionally, scientific services are becoming increasingly data-intensive, not only in terms of computationally intensive tasks but also in terms of storage resources. Computing paradigms such as High Performance Computing (HPC) and Cloud Computing are applied to e-science applications to meet these demands. However, adapting applications and services to these paradigms is not a trivial task, commonly requiring a deep knowledge of the underlying technologies, which often constitutes a barrier for its uptake by scientists in general. In this context, EOSC-SYNERGY, a collaborative project involving more than 20 institutions from eight European countries pooling their knowledge and experience to enhance EOSC's capabilities and capacities, aims to bring EOSC closer to the scientific communities. This article provides a summary analysis of the adaptations made in the ten thematic services of EOSC-SYNERGY to embrace this paradigm. These services are grouped into four categories: Earth Observation, Environment, Biomedicine, and Astrophysics. The analysis will lead to the identification of commonalities, best practices and common requirements, regardless of the thematic area of the service. Experience gained from the thematic services could be transferred to new services for the adoption of the EOSC ecosystem framework.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

A Novel Cloud-Based Framework for Standardised Simulations in the Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO)

LAGO, the Latin American Giant Observatory, is an extended cosmic ray observatory, consisting of a wide network of water Cherenkov detectors located in 10 countries. With different altitudes and geomagnetic rigidity cutoffs, their geographic distribution, combined with the new electronics for control, atmospheric sensing and data acquisition, allows the realisation of diverse astrophysics studies at a regional scale. It is an observatory designed, built and operated by the LAGO Collaboration, a non-centralised alliance of 30 institutions from 11 countries. While LAGO has access to different computational frameworks, it lacks standardised computational mechanisms to fully grasp its cooperative approach. The European Commission is fostering initiatives aligned to LAGO objectives, especially to enable Open Science and its long-term sustainability. This work introduces the adaptation of LAGO to this paradigm within the EOSC-Synergy project, focusing on the simulations of the expected astrophysical signatures at detectors deployed at the LAGO sites around the World.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2021

The EOSC-Synergy cloud services implementation for the Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO)

The Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO) is a distributed cosmic ray observatory at a regional scale in Latin America, by deploying a large network of Water Cherenkov detectors (WCD) and other astroparticle detectors in a wide range of latitudes from Antarctica to México, and altitudes from sea level to more than 5500 m a.s.l. Detectors telemetry, atmospherics conditions and flux of secondary particles at the ground are measured with extreme detail at each LAGO site by using our own-designed hardware and firmware (ACQUA). To combine and analyse all these data, LAGO developed ANNA, our data analysis framework. Additionally, ARTI, a complete framework of simulations designed to simulate the expected signals at our detectors coming from primary cosmic rays entering the Earth atmosphere, allowing a precise characterization of the sites in realistic atmospheric, geomagnetic and detector conditions. As the measured and synthetic data started to flow, we are facing challenging scenarios given a large amount of data emerging, performed on a diversity of detectors and computing architectures and e-infrastructures. These data need to be transferred, analyzed, catalogued, preserved, and provided for internal and public access and data-mining under an open e-science environment. In this work, we present the implementation of ARTI at the EOSC-Synergy cloud-based services as the first example of LAGO' frameworks that will follow the FAIR principles for provenance, data curation and re-using of data. For this, we calculate the flux of secondary particles expected in up to 1 week at detector level for all the 26 LAGO, and the 1-year flux of high energy secondaries expected at the ANDES Underground Laboratory and other sites. Therefore, we show how this development can help not only LAGO but other data-intensive cosmic rays observatories, muography experiments and underground laboratories.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2021

Characterization of the muography background using the Muon Telescope (MuTe)

In this work, we estimate the background components in muography using the MuTe: a hybrid muon telescope composed of two subdetectors -a scintillator hodoscope and a Water Cherenkov Detector (WCD). The hodoscope records the trajectories of particles crossing the telescope, while the WCD measures their energy loss. The MuTe hodoscope reconstructs 3841 different directions with an angular resolution of 32 mrad for an inter-panel distance of 2.5 m. The spatial resolution can reach $\sim$25.6 m assuming an 800 m distance to the target. The WCD measures the deposited energy from 50 MeV to 1.5 GeV with a resolution of 0.72 MeV. MuTe discriminates muography background sources such as: upward coming muons, scattered muons, the soft component of Extensive Air Showers (EAS), and particles arriving simultaneously. They are filtered by using measurements of deposited energy (WCD) and Time-of-Flight. The WCD differentiates single muons, electrons/positrons, and multiparticle events. On the other hand, the ToF measurements allow us to estimate the muon momentum establishing an energy threshold to decrease the background contribution of scattered muons. Upward coming muons are rejected by means of the particle arrival direction determined by the ToF sign. We concluded that near 36% of the recorded events belong to the electromagnetic component (electrons and positrons), roughly 30.4% is caused by multiple particle events that arrive with time differences < 100 ns and the last 34% are caused by muons. The muonic soft component (< 1 GeV/c) represents 46% of the single-muon events. The upward going particles add up the 22% of the total flux crossing the MuTe.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2019

Calibration and first measurements of MuTe: a hybrid Muon Telescope for geological structures

In this work, we describe the calibration and first measurements in the commissioning of MuTe, a hybrid Muon Telescope with two subdetectors --a scintillator hodoscope and a Water Cherenkov Detector (WCD)-- for imaging the inner structures of Colombian volcanoes. The hodoscope estimates the trajectories of particles impinging on the front and rear panel, while the WCD acts as a calorimeter for the through going charged particle. MuTe combines particle identification techniques so as to discriminate noise background from data. It filters the primary noise sources for muography, i.e., the EM-component ($e^{\pm}$) of Extensive Air Showers (EAS) and scattered/upward-coming muons. The WCD identifies Electrons/positrons events by their deposited energy identifies, while scattered and backward muons are rejected using a pico-second Time-of-Flight(ToF) system. Muon generated events were found in the deposited energy deposited range of ($144$MeV$ < E_d <$ 400MeV), represent only about the 40$\%$ of the WCD-hodoscope acquired events. The other 60$\%$ of data is composed by ($e^{\pm}$) events under 144 MeV and multiparticle events above 400 MeV. Subsequently, low-momentum muons ($<$ 1 GeV/c), which are scattered by the volcano surface, measures a ToF $>$ 3.3 ns for traversing one meter length.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2018

Results from The Latin American Giant Observatory Space Weather Simulation Chain

The Space Weather program of the Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO) Collaboration was designed to study the variation of the flux of atmospheric secondary particles at ground level produced during the interaction of cosmic rays with the air. This work complements and expands the inference capabilities of the LAGO detection network to identify the influence of solar activity on the particle flux, at places having different geomagnetic rigidity cut-offs and atmospheric depths. This program is developed through a series of Monte Carlo sequential simulations to compute the intensity spectrum of the various components of the radiation field on the ground. A key feature of these calculations is that we performed detailed radiation transport computations as a function of incident direction, time, altitude, as well as latitude and longitude. Magnetic rigidity calculations and corrections for geomagnetic field activity are established by using the MAGNETOCOSMICS code, and the estimation of the flux of secondaries at ground level is implemented by using the CORSIKA code; thus we can examine the local peculiarities in the penumbral regions with a more realistic description of the atmospheric and geomagnetic response in these complex regions of the rigidity space. As an example of our calculation scheme, we report some result on the flux at ground level for two LAGO locations: Bucaramanga-Colombia and San Carlos de Bariloche-Argentina, for the geomagnetically active period of May 2005.

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2017

LAGO: the Latin American Giant Observatory

The Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO) is an extended cosmic ray observatory composed of a network of water-Cherenkov detectors (WCD) spanning over different sites located at significantly different altitudes (from sea level up to more than $5000$\,m a.s.l.) and latitudes across Latin America, covering a wide range of geomagnetic rigidity cut-offs and atmospheric absorption/reaction levels. The LAGO WCD is simple and robust, and incorporates several integrated devices to allow time synchronization, autonomous operation, on board data analysis, as well as remote control and automated data transfer. This detection network is designed to make detailed measurements of the temporal evolution of the radiation flux coming from outer space at ground level. LAGO is mainly oriented to perform basic research in three areas: high energy phenomena, space weather and atmospheric radiation at ground level. It is an observatory designed, built and operated by the LAGO Collaboration, a non-centralized collaborative union of more than 30 institutions from ten countries. In this paper we describe the scientific and academic goals of the LAGO project - illustrating its present status with some recent results - and outline its future perspectives.

astro-ph.IM↗