Simulation of atmospheric temperature effects on cosmic ray muon flux
- Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal de Goiás, CP 131, 74001-970, Goiânia, GO (Brazil)
The collision between a cosmic ray and an atmosphere nucleus produces a set of secondary particles, which will decay or interact with other atmosphere elements. This set of events produced a primary particle is known as an extensive air shower (EAS) and is composed by a muonic, a hadronic and an electromagnetic component. The muonic flux, produced mainly by pions and kaons decays, has a dependency with the atmosphere’s effective temperature: an increase in the effective temperature results in a lower density profile, which decreases the probability of pions and kaons to interact with the atmosphere and, consequently, resulting in a major number of meson decays. Such correlation between the muon flux and the atmosphere’s effective temperature was measured by a set of experiments, such as AMANDA, Borexino, MACRO and MINOS. This phenomena can be investigated by simulating the final muon flux produced by two different parameterizations of the isothermal atmospheric model in CORSIKA, where each parameterization is described by a depth function which can be related to the muon flux in the same way that the muon flux is related to the temperature. This research checks the agreement among different high energy hadronic interactions models and the physical expected behavior of the atmosphere temperature effect by analyzing a set of variables, such as the height of the primary interaction and the difference in the muon flux.
- OSTI ID:
- 22391843
- Journal Information:
- AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1663, Issue 1; Conference: NuINT12: 8. International Workshop on Neutrino-Nucleus Internactions in the Few-GeV Region, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), 22-27 Oct 2012; Other Information: (c) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-243X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
79 ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
CORRELATIONS
COSMIC KAONS
COSMIC MUONS
COSMIC PIONS
COSMIC RAY FLUX
EXTENSIVE AIR SHOWERS
MUON-NUCLEON INTERACTIONS
PARTICLE DECAY
PION-NUCLEON INTERACTIONS
STRATOSPHERE
TEMPERATURE DEPENDENCE