Exploiting the geomagnetic distortion of the inclined atmospheric showers

Understand

We propose a novel approach for the determination of the nature of ultra-high energy cosmic rays by exploiting the geomagnetic deviation of muons in nearly horizontal showers.

• The distribution of the muons at ground level is well described by a simple parametrization providing a few shape parameters tightly correlated to $X^\mu_\mathrm{max}$, the depth of maximal muon production, which is a mass indicator tightly correlated to the usual parameter $X_\mathrm{max}$, the depth of maximal development of the shower.
• We show that some constraints can be set on the predictions of hadronic models, especially by combining the geomagnetic distortion with standard measurement of the longitudinal profile.
• We discuss the precision needed to obtain significant results and we propose a schematic layout of a detector.