Lateral Distribution of Muons in IceCube Cosmic Ray Events

Understand

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.