http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.02427
The particle showers produced in the atmosphere due to the interactions of primary cosmic particles require a thorough understanding in the backdrop of searches for rare interactions. While the showers encompass the physics of strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions, the very first interactions are strong interactions producing hadronic showers which could introduce uncertainties in the estimates of particle yields. In this work, we made a comprehensive study of air shower simulations using various combinations of hadronic models and particle transport code of the CORSIKA package. The hadronic particles mostly pions and kaons decay to muons which are the most abundant charged particles on Earth. The primary proton and helium distributions are taken as power law which are scaled to match the measured flux in balloon experiments at the top of atmosphere. The shower simulation includes production, transport, and decays of secondaries up to the ground level. In this study, we focus on the bulk of the spectra and particles rather than very high energy showers. We provide a way to normalize the simulation results to be compared with the ground-based measurements namely, single and multiple muon yields and their charge ratios as a function of zenith angle and momentum. This provides a basis for comparisons amoung the six model combinations used in this study and the differences are outlined. Most of the hadronic models in CORSIKA produce the bulk ground based measurements fairly well. We use one of the best model combinations to quantitatively predict the absolute and relative yields of various particles at ground level as well as their correlations with primaries and with each other.
H. Sogarwal and P. Shukla
Mon, 7 Nov 22
14/67
Comments: 26 pages, 18 figures