| Issue |
EPJ Web of Conferences
Volume 52, 2013
ISVHECRI 2012 – XVII International Symposium on Very High Energy Cosmic Ray Interactions
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 03003 | |
| Number of page(s) | 8 | |
| Section | EAS Physics | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/20135203003 | |
| Published online | 10 June 2013 | |
https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/20135203003
Extensive Air Showers: from the muonic smoking guns to the hadronic backbone
LIP, Av. Elias Garcia 14-1, 1000, Lisboa
a e-mail: cazon@lip.pt
Extensive Air Showers are complex macroscopic objects initiated by single ultra-high energy particles. They are the result of millions of high energy reactions in the atmosphere and can be described as the superposition of hadronic and electromagnetic cascades. The hadronic cascade is the air shower backbone, and it is mainly made of pions. Decays of neutral pions initiate electromagnetic cascades, while the decays of charged pions produce muons which leave the hadronic core and travel many kilometers almost unaffected. Muons are smoking guns of the hadronic cascade: the energy, transverse momentum, spatial distribution and depth of production are key to reconstruct the history of the air shower. In this work, we overview the phenomenology of muons on the air shower and its relation to the hadronic cascade. We briefly review the experimental efforts to analyze muons within air showers and discuss possible paths to use this information.
© Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2013
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.