First results from Run-1 of the Extreme Energy Events experiment

The Extreme Energy Events (EEE) Project is an experiment for the detection of Extensive Atmospheric Showers of energy greater than 1011 eV. It consists of an array of telescopes hosted in High Schools spread on the Italian territory, each made of three Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers very similar to the ones built for the Time Of Flight system of the ALICE experiment at CERN. The telescopes are managed and constructed at CERN by teams of students and teachers: this peculiarity enhances the scientific relevance of its goals with an effective outreach action. The experiment took a first coordinated data taking (“Pilot-Run”) in fall 2014 and another (“Run1”) from February to April 2015. About thirty telescopes took data at the same time and more than 5 billions of cosmic ray events have been collected. Data were transmitted to the CNAF – the biggest Italian storage and computing center managed by INFN – to be reconstructed and analyzed. In this presentation an overall description of the experiment will be given and the most recent results will be shown. In particular we have a first set of measurements of the coincidences in pairs of telescopes even more than 1 km apart, and a study of variations with time of the muon cosmic flux, related on astrophysical phenomena like Forbush decreases.