The IceTop cosmic ray detector: study of the energy spectrum around the knee, and veto for IceCube

The Earth is constantly bombarded by charged particles from the cosmos. These cosmic
rays have energies which can be as high as 100 million times what is produced in the LHC accelerator. Although they were first discovered 100 years ago, the details of the energy spectrum and of the composition of the cosmic rays are still not well known. In this project we want to determine the energy spectrum, and the composition, at energies between 300 PeV and 1 EeV with the IceTop detector at the South Pole. We also want to use IceTop as an active veto against charged particle background in the search for dark matter with the DeepCore array of IceCube.