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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik
T 24: Neutrinoastronomie II
T 24.1: Talk
Tuesday, March 20, 2018, 16:30–16:45, Philo-HS1
Laterally separated muons from cosmic ray air showers in IceCube — •Dennis Soldin for the IceCube collaboration — University of Delaware, Bartol Research Institute and Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Newark, DE 19716, USA
Cosmic ray air showers with primary energies above 10 TeV can produce high-energy muons with large transverse momentum (pT 2 GeV). These isolated muons can have large transverse separations from the shower core, up to several hundred meters. Together with the muon bundle they form a double track signature in km3-scale neutrino telescopes such as IceCube. The separation from the core is a measure of the transverse momentum of the muon’s parent particle. For pT 2 GeV, particle interactions can be described in the context of perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD). Hence, measurements of these muons may contribute to test pQCD predictions of high energy interactions involving intermediate nuclei.
We present a measurement of laterally separated muons using three years of IceCube data, taken between May 2012 and May 2015. The resulting lateral separation distributions of muons between 135 m and 450 m will be shown for various primary energies. These distributions are used to derive estimates of the transverse momenta of high-energy muons, which approximately correspond to the underlying hadron distributions. The resulting transverse momentum distributions are compared to Monte Carlo simulations and recent accelerator data of charged hadrons. In addition, we present studies of seasonal atmospheric effects on the production of muons at large altitudes.