Instrumentation for the northern site of the Pierre Auger Observatory

The Pierre Auger Observatory is a multi-national project for research on ultra-high energy cosmic rays. Science results from the Southern Auger Observatory motivate the completion and extension of the investigations begun there by constructing the Northern Auger Observatory, with a much larger acceptance for the extremely rare cosmic ray events above a few times 10 19 eV. This paper describes the layout and technical implementation of Auger North, highlighting advances with respect to the Auger South instrumentation that have been made to improve performance, reduce costs, and accommodate differences between the Southern and Northern sites. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved