Speaker
Description
Cosmic rays that enter the Earth's atmosphere interact with air nuclei, initiating a cascade - an air shower. The secondary particles that reach the ground can be measured with large detector arrays. Understanding the air-shower development is crucial for the interpretation of cosmic-ray observables and strongly depends on our knowledge of high-energy hadron production. During the air-shower development, hadronic cascades decay into muons in a broad range of energies. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory together with its surface array, IceTop, provide unique possibilities to detect these muons. The in-ice array of optical modules can detect air-shower muons in the TeV energy range. IceTop, an array of ice-Cherenkov tanks, measures the dominant electromagnetic component as well as GeV muons. These measurements allow us to probe hadronic multiparticle production at different stages of the air-shower development. In this contribution we will focus on the density of low-energy muons obtained with IceTop, as well as on the high-energy muon multiplicity from the in-ice data. We will show these studies for different hadronic interaction models and discuss resulting differences.
| Preferred track | Cosmic Rays and Astrophysics |
|---|---|
| Subfield | HEP experiment |
| Attending in-person? | Yes |
| On behalf of collaboration? | IceCube |
