Profiles of energetic muons in the atmosphere

Abstract

The production spectrum of high-energy muons as a function of depth in the atmosphere is relevant for understanding properties of event rates in deep detectors. For a given atmospheric profile, cascades of heavy nuclei develop at higher altitude than proton showers, giving rise to larger separation of muons at depth. For a given type of primary cosmic ray, seasonal variations in muon rates reflect the fact that higher temperatures correspond to lower densities and to a relative increase in the ratio of decay to re-interaction of the parent mesons. In this paper, we present a generalization of the Elbert formula that tracks meson decay to muons along the trajectory of the primary cosmic-ray nucleus. The convolution of the production spectrum with a changing atmospheric profile provides the dependence of event rates and sizes of muon bundles on temperature and primary mass. We consider applications to IceCube and also to multiple muon events in the compact underground detectors of MINOS and the NOvA Near Detector.

22 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables. Submitted to Astroparticle Physics

References in corpus (3)

• Observation of muon intensity variations by season with the MINOS Near Detector
• Observation of seasonal variation of atmospheric multiple-muon events in the MINOS Near and Far Detectors
• Seasonal Variation of Atmospheric Muons

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Atmospheric muons and their variations with temperature
• Observation of Cosmic-Ray Anisotropy in the Southern Hemisphere with 12 yr of Data Collected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory
• Measurement of the mean number of muons with energies above 500 GeV in air showers detected with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory
• Seasonal Variation of Atmospheric Muons
• Explanation of the seasonal variation of cosmic multiple muon events observed with the NOvA Near Detector