Studying High pT muons in Cosmic-Ray Air Showers
Most cosmic-ray air shower arrays have focused on detectingelectromagnetic shower particles and low energy muons. A few groups (mostnotably MACRO + EASTOP and SPASE + AMANDA) have studied the high energymuon component of showers. However, these experiments had small solidangles, and did not study muons far from the core. The IceTop + IceCubecombination, with its 1 km$^2$ muon detection area can study muons farfrom the shower core. IceCube can measure their energy loss ($dE/dx$),and hence their energy. With the energy, and the known distribution ofproduction heights, the transverse momentum ($$p_T$$) spectrum of high$$p_T$$ muons can be determined. The production of the semuons iscalculable in perturbative QCD, so the measured muon spectra can be usedto probe the composition of incident cosmic-rays.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Director, Office of Science; National ScienceFoundation
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC02-05CH11231; NSF:OPP-0236449
- OSTI ID:
- 923461
- Report Number(s):
- LBNL-62506; R&D Project: NI1512; BnR: 600305000; TRN: US0801841
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: XIV International Symposium on Very High EnergyCosmic Ray Interactions, WeiHai, China, August 15-22,2006
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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