Test of hadronic interaction models with the KASCADE-Grande muon data

¹ Universidad Michoacana, Instituto de Física y Matemáticas, Morelia, Mexico
² Institut für Kernphysik, KIT - Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, Germany
³ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy
⁴ Institut für Experimentelle Kernphysik, KIT - Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, Germany
⁵ National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering, Bucharest, Romania
⁶ Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, INAF Torino, Italy
⁷ Universidade Sãao Paulo, Instituto de Física de São Carlos, Brasil
⁸ Fachbereich Physik, Universität Wuppertal, Germany
⁹ Department of Physics, Siegen University, Germany
¹⁰ Dept. of Astrophysics, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
¹¹ National Centre for Nuclear Research, Department of Cosmic Ray Physics, Lodz, Poland
¹² Department of Physics, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania
¹³ now at: Max-Planck-Institut Physik, München, Germany
¹⁴ now at: University of Trondheim, Norway
¹⁵ now at: Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologia, INRIM, Torino, Italy
¹⁶ now at: University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

^a e-mail: arteaga@ifm.umich.mx

Abstract

KASCADE-Grande is an air-shower observatory devoted for the detection of cosmic rays with energies in the interval of 10¹⁴ – 10¹⁸ eV, where the Grande array is responsible for the higher energy range. The experiment comprises different detection systems which allow precise measurements of the charged, electron and muon numbers of extensive air-showers (EAS). These data is employed not only to reconstruct the properties of the primary cosmic-ray particle but also to test hadronic interaction models at high energies. In this contribution, predictions of the muon content of EAS from QGSJET II-2, SIBYLL 2.1 and EPOS 1.99 are confronted with the experimental measurements performed with the KASCADE-Grande experiment in order to test the validity of these hadronic models commonly used in EAS simulations.