Exploiting the geomagnetic distortion of the inclined atmospheric showers

Abstract

We propose a novel approach for the determination of the nature of ultra-high energy cosmic rays by exploiting the geomagnetic deviation of muons in nearly horizontal showers. The distribution of the muons at ground level is well described by a simple parametrization providing a few shape parameters tightly correlated to $X_{\max }^{\mu }$, the depth of maximal muon production, which is a mass indicator tightly correlated to the usual parameter $X_{\max }$, the depth of maximal development of the shower. We show that some constraints can be set on the predictions of hadronic models, especially by combining the geomagnetic distortion with standard measurement of the longitudinal profile. We discuss the precision needed to obtain significant results and we propose a schematic layout of a detector.

23 pages, 16 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis
• Depth of Maximum of Air-Shower Profiles at the Pierre Auger Observatory: Measurements at Energies above 10^17.8 eV
• An improved limit to the diffuse flux of ultra-high energy neutrinos from the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Detection of ultra-high energy cosmic ray showers with a single-pixel fluorescence telescope

Cited by in corpus (3)

• The Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection (GRAND): Science and Design
• The GRAND project and GRANDProto300 experiment
• Restoration of azimuthal symmetry of muon densities in extended air showers