CORSIKA72025/02/16 by Ludwig Neste, Neste, Ludwig, Pascal Gutjahr +14 · 2 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #Muon and positron interactions and applications #Particle Detector Development and Performance #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.10951
openalex publication_date 2025/02/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Extensive air showers produce high-energy muons that can be utilized to probe hadronic interaction models in cosmic ray interactions. Most muons originate from pion and kaon decays, called conventional muons, while a smaller fraction, referred to as prompt muons, arises from the decay of heavier, short-lived hadrons. The EHISTORY option of the air shower simulation tool CORSIKA7 is used in this work to investigate the prompt and conventional muon flux in the energy range of 100 TeV to 100 PeV, utilizing the newly developed open-source python software PANAMA. Identifying the muon parent particles allows for scaling the contribution of prompt particles, which can be leveraged by future experimental analyses to measure the normalization of the prompt muon flux. Obtained prompt muon spectra from CORSIKA7 are compared to MCEq results. The relevance to large-volume neutrino detectors, such as IceCube and KM3NeT, and the connection to hadronic interaction models is discussed.