Related papers: Soft Particle Production in Cosmic Ray Showers
A major challenge in ground-based ultra-high-energy gamma-ray observations remains in discriminating sporadic gamma-ray signals from a huge background of cosmic-ray events. To achieve good discrimination power of gamma rays against protons,…
Very high energy cosmic rays are typically studied by measuring extensive air showers formed by secondary particles produced in collisions with air nuclei. The indirect character of the measurement makes the physics interpretation of cosmic…
Muons with a high transverse momentum (p_T) are produced in cosmic ray air showers via semileptonic decay of heavy quarks and the decay of high p_T kaons and pions. These high p_T muons have a large lateral separation from the shower core…
The Pierre Auger Observatory is the most sensitive instrument to detect photons with energies above $10^{17}$ eV. It measures extensive air showers generated by ultra high energy cosmic rays using a hybrid technique that exploits the…
The Pierre Auger Observatory has conducted measurements of the energy spectrum and mass composition of cosmic rays using different methods. Utilizing both surface and fluorescence detectors (SD and FD), the Observatory provides…
In extensive air shower experiments, the number of muons crossing a detector at a given position, as well as their arrival time, arrival direction, and energy, are determined by a more fundamental 3-dimensional distribution linked to the…
Underground experiments searching for rare events, such as interactions from dark matter, need to exhibit background as low as possible. One source of background is from cosmic ray muons and muon-induced neutron production. Presently these…
We present a detailed statistical treatment of the energy calibration of hybrid air-shower detectors, which combine a surface detector array and a fluorescence detector, to obtain an unbiased estimate of the calibration curve. The special…
AMIGA (Auger Muons and Infill for the Ground Array) is an upgrade of the Pierre Auger Observatory to complement the study of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECR) by measuring the muon content of extensive air showers (EAS). It consists of…
In models with substructure in the fermionic sector, excited fermion states are expected. Excited leptons could be produced in the interaction of high energy quasi-horizontal cosmic neutrinos with the atmosphere via neutral and charged…
In this paper we study the sensitivity of the flux of atmospheric muons to uncertainties in the primary cosmic ray spectrum and to the treatment of the geomagnetic field in a calculation. We use the air shower simulation program AIRES to…
The interpretation of extensive air shower (EAS) measurements is strongly dependent on the hadronic interaction models used for simulating reference showers. We study the importance of low-energy hadronic interactions in simulated air…
We present an analysis of the correlation between the depth of the maximum of air-shower profiles and the signal in water-Cherenkov stations in events registered simultaneously by the fluorescence and surface detectors of the Pierre Auger…
We explore the discovery potential of cosmic ray physics experiments for Standard Model processes involving the nonperturbative production of O(30) weak gauge bosons. We demonstrate an experimental insensitivity to proton-induced processes…
The Pierre Auger (cosmic ray) Observatory provides a laboratory for studying fundamental physics at energies far beyond those available at colliders. The Observatory is sensitive not only to hadrons and photons, but can in principle detect…
The muons of cosmic rays air showers in the Extreme Energy Events (EEE) project are detected with three Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPC) with good tracking capability. These muon telescopes are located in high schools spread all…
The Pierre Auger Observatory is planned to be upgraded so that the energy spectrum of cosmic rays can be studied down to 0.1 EeV and the muon component of showers can be determined. The former will lead to a spectrum measured by one…
Measuring the angles of muons and electrons in air showers is proposed as a method for studying the primary cosmic-ray mass composition near the knee of the cosmic-ray energy spectrum at a few $10^{15}$ eV. Conventional tracking detectors…
Using CORSIKA simulations, we investigate the mass sensitivity of cosmic-ray air-shower observables for sites at the South Pole and Malarg\"ue, Argentina, the respective locations of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the Pierre Auger…
Medium-energy electron beam-dump experiments provide an intense sources of secondary muons. These particles can be used to search for muon-coupling light dark scalars that may explain the $(g-2)_\mu$ anomaly. We applied this idea to SLAC…