Characterization of atmospheric muons at sea level using a cosmic ray telescope

Abstract

In this work, a portable cosmic-ray telescope was designed, assembled and operated to measure the cosmic-ray induced atmospheric muon flux at ground level. The instrument was entirely characterized and modeled from the point-of-view of detector efficiency, energy detection window and counting rate. Experimental data are reported for the characterization of the muon flux at sea level (43°N of latitude) in terms of vertical muon intensity and zenithal angle dependence.

A water tank muon spectrometer for the characterization of low energy atmospheric muons

“…In order to optimize the spectrometer operation and to be sure that the spectrometer detects and counts only atmospheric muons, a careful calibration of the instrument has been performed, very similarly to that carried out in [19] for the cosmic ray telescope. The calibration procedure consists in the following three steps:…”

“…(i) the detection threshold of the pulses coming out of each PM has been fine-tuned (around 130 mV), which ensures that the low-energy peak (due to the PM noise and the contribution of ambient gamma radiation) is well rejected, the counting rate thus only corresponding to the contribution of the sole charged atmospheric muons (see Fig. 3 in [19] for details) ;…”

“…In this context, we recently developed a muon telescope to measure the cosmic-ray induced atmospheric muon flux at sea level (43°N of latitude) in terms of vertical muon intensity and zenithal angle dependence [19]. However, the energy distribution of the muon flux cannot be measured with the instrument developed in [19]. In the present work, we thus developed a new instrument, called "water tank muon spectrometer" to precisely measure the energy distribution of atmospheric muons in the range of hundreds of MeV.…”

Determination of muon absorption coefficients in heavy metal elements

“…The use of gaseous detectors is relevant for measuring the attenuation of cosmic muon in heavy metals. It has been proven that for measuring muon intensity, gaseous detectors can achieve a higher resolution of detection than scintillation detectors at costs that are still reasonable (Autran, Munteanu, Saoud, & Moindjie, 2018;Procureur, 2017;Procureur, Dupré, & Aune, 2013). In this work, a telescope of two GM counters was used to detect the high-Z dense material.…”

“…He also found the range of muon energy suitable for small objects and measured the attenuation coefficient for aluminum and steel (Schreiner III, 2016). Autran et al (2018) designed a portable telescope made up of two detectors with efficiency sufficient for measuring the count rate of muon at the sea level to study the variation of muon intensity with the zenithal and azimuthal angles. A review with an emphasis on the recent progress of high-energy cosmic rays was presented by Mollerach and Roulet (2018).…”