Wuppertal 2015 – scientific programme
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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik
T 25: Kosmische Strahlung II
T 25.5: Talk
Monday, March 9, 2015, 17:45–18:00, I.13.65 (HS 26)
High pT muons from cosmic ray air showers in IceCube — •Dennis Soldin for the IceCube collaboration — University of Wuppertal, D-42119 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 quantum chromodynamics (pQCD), should be visible in a transition in the pT spectrum and thus in the lateral separation distribution. Assuming the validity of pQCD calculations, the muon distributions depend on the incident nuclei. Therefore high pT muons are sensitive to the cosmic ray mass composition and will moreover 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 the detection of laterally separated muons in the final IceCube 86-string configuration including dedicated reconstruction and simulation methods.