33RD INTERNATIONAL COSMIC RAY CONFERENCE, RIO DE JANEIRO 2013 THE ASTROPARTICLE PHYSICS CONFERENCE Highlights from the Pierre Auger Observatory

Abstract: The Pierre Auger Observatory is the world’s largest cosmic ray observatory. Our current exposure reaches nearly 40,000 km2 str and provides us with an unprecedented quality data set. The performance and stability of the detectors and their enhancements are described. Data analyses have led to a number of major breakthroughs. Among these we discuss the energy spectrum and the searches for large-scale anisotropies. We present analyses of our Xmax data and show how it can be interpreted in terms of mass composition. We also describe some new analyses that extract mass sensitive parameters from the 100 % duty cycle SD data. A coherent interpretation of all these recent results opens new directions. The consequences regarding the cosmic ray composition and the properties of UHECR sources are briefly discussed