No Arabic abstract
In cosmic ray air showers, the muon lateral separation from the center of the shower is a measure of the transverse momentum that the muon parent acquired in the cosmic ray interaction. IceCube has observed cosmic ray interactions that produce muons laterally separated by up to 400 m from the shower core, a factor of 6 larger distance than previous measurements. These muons originate in high pT (> 2 GeV/c) interactions from the incident cosmic ray, or high-energy secondary interactions. The separation distribution shows a transition to a power law at large values, indicating the presence of a hard pT component that can be described by perturbative quantum chromodynamics. However, the rates and the zenith angle distributions of these events are not well reproduced with the cosmic ray models tested here, even those that include charm interactions. This discrepancy may be explained by a larger fraction of kaons and charmed particles than is currently incorporated in the simulations.
The direct detection of particle dark matter through its scattering with nucleons is of fundamental importance to understand the nature of DM. In this work, we propose that the high-energy neutrino detectors like IceCube can be used to uniquely probe the DM-nucleon cross-section for high-energy DM of $sim$ PeV, up-scattered by the high-energy cosmic rays. We derive for the first time strong constraints on the DM-nucleon cross-section down to $sim 10^{-32}$ cm$^2$ at this energy scale for sub-GeV DM candidates. Such independent probe at energy scale far exceeding other existing direct detection experiments can therefore provide useful insights complementary to other searches.
IceCube Collaboration Contributions to the 2009 International Cosmic Ray Conference
The IceCube experiment has recently reported the observation of 28 high-energy (> 30 TeV) neutrino events, separated into 21 showers and 7 muon tracks, consistent with an extraterrestrial origin. In this letter we compute the compatibility of such an observation with possible combinations of neutrino flavors with relative proportion (alpha_e:alpha_mu:alpha_tau). Although the 7:21 track-to-shower ratio is naively favored for the canonical (1:1:1) at Earth, this is not true once the atmospheric muon and neutrino backgrounds are properly accounted for. We find that, for an astrophysical neutrino E^(-2) energy spectrum, (1:1:1) at Earth is disfavored at 81% C.L. If this proportion does not change, 6 more years of data would be needed to exclude (1:1:1) at Earth at 3 sigma C.L. Indeed, with the recently-released 3-year data, that flavor composition is excluded at 92% C.L. The best-fit is obtained for (1:0:0) at Earth, which cannot be achieved from any flavor ratio at sources with averaged oscillations during propagation. If confirmed, this result would suggest either a misunderstanding of the expected background events, or a misidentification of tracks as showers, or even more compellingly, some exotic physics which deviates from the standard scenario.
Muon radiography is a promising technique to image the internal density structures upto a few hundred meters scale, such as tunnels, pyramids and volcanos, by measuring the flux attenuation of cosmic ray muons after trvaling through these targets. In this study, we conducted an experimantal cosmic ray muon radiography of the Wudalianchi volcano in northeast China for imaging its internal density structures. The muon detector used in this study is made of plastic scintillator and silicon photomultiplier. After about one and a half month observation for the Laoheishan volcano cone in the Wudalianchi volcano, from September 23rd to November 10th, 2019, more than 3 million muon tracks passing the data selection criteria are obtained. Based on the muon observations and the high-resoluiton topography from aerial photogrammetry by unmanned aerial vehicle, the relative density image of the Laoheishan volcano cone is obtained. The experiment in this study is the first muon radiography of volcano performed in China, and the results suggest the feasibility of radiography technique based on plastic scintillator muon detector. As a new passive geophysical imaging method, cosmic ray muon radiography could become a promising method to obtain the high-resoution 2-D and 3-D density structures for shallow geological targets.
The spatial distribution of Cherenkov radiation from cascade showers generated by muons in water has been measured with Cherenkov water calorimeter (CWC) NEVOD. This result allowed to improve the techniques of treating cascade showers with unknown axes by means of CWC response analysis. The techniques of selecting the events with high energy cascade showers and reconstructing their parameters are discussed. Preliminary results of measurements of the spectrum of cascade showers in the energy range 100 GeV - 20 TeV generated by cosmic ray muons at large zenith angles and their comparison with expectation are presented.