Thesis defense of Alicia Fattorini

The search for the origin of charged cosmic rays remains one of the greatest challenges in astrophysics. Extremely accelerated particles propagate through the universe carrying the secrets of the most energetic cosmic phenomena. While neutral particles are not deflected by magnetic fields and point back to their sources, charged cosmic rays arrive on Earth as a diffuse flux, making it nearly impossible to identify their origin. The MAGIC telescopes, primarily designed to detect high-energetic gamma rays, also have the potential to study charged cosmic rays.
This work presents the analysis chain to produce a proton spectrum from data measured with the MAGIC telescopes. The analysis chain includes data preparation, machine learning algorithms for particle reconstruction, and unfolding techniques which consider remaining background contributions. New simulations of air showers induced by charged cosmic rays are used in this analysis and tested accordingly.
This work illustrates the potential of IACTs for the research of charged cosmic rays and provides the first proton spectrum of MAGIC, which constitutes a valuable addition to previous measurements by other cosmic-ray experiments.

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