Study of cosmic ray events with high muon multiplicity using the ALICE detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider
ALICE Collaboration. (2016). Study of cosmic ray events with high muon multiplicity using the ALICE detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2016(1), Article 032. https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2016/01/032
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Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle PhysicsAuthors
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2016Copyright
© 2016 CERN for the benefit of ALICE Collaboration. Content
from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
ALICE is one of four large experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider near
Geneva, specially designed to study particle production in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions.
Located 52 meters underground with 28 meters of overburden rock, it has also been
used to detect muons produced by cosmic ray interactions in the upper atmosphere. In this
paper, we present the multiplicity distribution of these atmospheric muons and its comparison
with Monte Carlo simulations. This analysis exploits the large size and excellent tracking
capability of the ALICE Time Projection Chamber. A special emphasis is given to the study
of high multiplicity events containing more than 100 reconstructed muons and corresponding
to a muon areal density ρµ > 5.9 m−2
. Similar events have been studied in previous underground
experiments such as ALEPH and DELPHI at LEP. While these experiments were able
to reproduce the measured muon multiplicity distribution with Monte Carlo simulations at
low and intermediate multiplicities, their simulations failed to describe the frequency of the
highest multiplicity events. In this work we show that the high multiplicity events observed in
ALICE stem from primary cosmic rays with energies above 1016 eV and that the frequency of
these events can be successfully described by assuming a heavy mass composition of primary
cosmic rays in this energy range. The development of the resulting air showers was simulated
using the latest version of QGSJET to model hadronic interactions. This observation places
significant constraints on alternative, more exotic, production mechanisms for these events.
...
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Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd.; Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)ISSN Search the Publication Forum
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Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
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