Energy and angular distributions of atmospheric muons at the Earth

Understand

A fair knowledge of the atmospheric muon distributions at Earth is a prerequisite for the simulations of cosmic ray setups and rare event search detectors.

• A modified power law is proposed for atmospheric muon energy distribution which gives a good description of the cosmic muon data in low as well as high energy regime.
• Using this distribution, analytical forms for zenith angle ($\theta$) distribution are obtained.
• Assuming a flat Earth, it leads to the $\cos^{n-1}\theta$ form where it is shown that the parameter $n$ is nothing but the power of the energy distribution.