Speaker
Description
The measurement of the cosmic ray spectrum has been carried out for several decades to improve our understanding of its composition, energy spectrum, and angular dependence. These observations are strongly influenced by the geographical location of the detector due to variations in the geomagnetic field and atmospheric conditions. Among the secondary cosmic ray particles, muons play a crucial role, as their observed spectrum provides an important input for tuning Monte Carlo event generators used in atmospheric neutrino simulations.
A prototype of the magnetised Iron CALorimeter (ICAL), known as mini-ICAL, was constructed near Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India (9°57′N, 77°16′E, 160 m above sea level). The detector consists of 11 layers of 4 m × 4 m, 5.6 cm thick iron plates, interleaved with 4 cm gaps to house 10 layers of Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) of active area 1.74 m × 1.85 m.
Using this setup, cosmic muon data were collected and analysed to study the dependence of the muon spectrum on momentum, zenith angle, and azimuthal angle, separately for μ⁺ and μ⁻. Notably, only a limited number of such measurements exist near the geomagnetic equator, where the cutoff rigidity varies from 17 GeV to 30 GeV for the inclination angle from 0 to 60 degree zenith angle on eastern direction. The results obtained from mini-ICAL are compared with simulations of extensive air showers using CORSIKA, and tuned parameters of different phenomenological hadronic interaction models will be presented in this paper.
| Position | Visiting Fellow |
|---|---|
| Affiliation | Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai |
| Country | India |