Atmospheric Muon Flux at Sea Level, Underground and Underwater
Abstract
The vertical sea-level muon spectrum at energies above 1 GeV and the muon intensities at depths up to 18 km w.e. in different rocks and in water are calculated. The atmospheric hadron-cascade model is applied, which takes into account the logarithmic growth with energy of inelastic cross sections and pion, kaon, and nucleon generation in pion-nucleus collisions. To evaluate the prompt muon contribution, we apply the two phenomenological approaches to the charm production problem: the recombination quark-parton model and the quark- gluon string model. We give simple fitting formulas describing our numerical results. Our analysis shows that at the depths up to 6-7 km w.e., essentially all underground data on the muon flux correlate with each other and with the predicted one for conventional muons, to within 10%. However, the high-energy sea-level muon data as well as the data at high depths are contradictory and cannot be quantitatively described by a single nuclear-cascade model.Keywords
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