Cosmic Ray Spectral Deformation Caused by Energy Determination Errors

Using simulation methods, distortion effects on energy spectra caused by errors in the energy determination have been investigated. For cosmic ray proton spectra, falling steeply with kinetic energy E as E-2.7, significant effects appear. When magnetic spectrometers are used to determine the energy, the relative error increases linearly with the energy and distortions with a sinusoidal form appear starting at an energy that depends significantly on the error distribution but at an energy lower than that corresponding to the Maximum Detectable Rigidity of the spectrometer. The effect should be taken into consideration when comparing data from different experiments, often having different error distributions.