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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik
T 52: Kosmische Strahlung 2
T 52.6: Talk
Tuesday, March 25, 2014, 18:05–18:20, P5
High pT muons from cosmic ray air showers in IceCube — •Dennis Soldin for the IceCube collaboration — Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany
Cosmic rays enter the atmosphere with energies up to 1011 GeV and produce showers of secondary particles. Inside these showers muons with high transverse momentum (pT > 2 GeV) may be produced from the decay of heavy quarks or from high pT pions and kaons. These isolated muons can have large transversal separations from the shower core up to several hundred meters, forming a double or triple track signature in IceCube. The separation from the core is a measure of the transverse momentum of the muon parent.
Experimentally the transition from soft to hard interactions, that can be described in perturbative QCD (pQCD), should be visible in a transition in the pT spectrum and thus in the lateral separation distribution. Moreover previous studies have shown a disagreement between data and simulations that rely on phenomenological models. Since high pT muons are produced very early in the shower development these muons can help to understand the uncertainties due to phenomenological models as well as test pQCD predictions at the highest energies.
We present the status of an analysis of laterally separated muons in the final IceCube 86-string configuration including new reconstruction and simulation methods.