The Puzzle of Muons in Extensive Air Showers

Abstract

In order to examine a muon excess observed by the Pierre Auger Observatory, detailed Monte Carlo simulations were carried out for primary protons, iron nuclei and strangelets (hypothetical stable lumps of strange quark matter). We obtained a rough agreement between the simulations and the data for ordinary nuclei without any contribution of strangelets in primary flux of cosmic rays. Our simulations suggest that the shower observables are dominated by details of hadronic interaction models.

17 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in International Journal of Modern Physics D

References in corpus (5)

• Measurement of the proton-air cross-section at $\sqrt{s}=57$ TeV with the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Testing Hadronic Interactions at Ultrahigh Energies with Air Showers Measured by the Pierre Auger Observatory
• New facts about muon production in Extended Air Shower simulations
• Hadronic Multiparticle Production at Ultra-High Energies and Extensive Air Showers
• On the measurement of the proton-air cross section using air shower data

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Measurement of the fluctuations in the number of muons in extensive air showers with the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Sibyll${}^{★}$