New aspects of muon and electron abundance in small EAS

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Abstract
A three-dimensional simulation of muon and electron components has been performed for showers with energies 2*104 and 2*107 GeV, using a model which takes into account the most important results in recent UA1 and UA5 CERN collider data. Lateral muon structure functions become steeper with increasing energy and the index alpha in Delta mu approximately=Nealpha decreases with distance from values near 0.85 around 5 m down to 0.43 at approximately 2 km from the shower axis, at a fixed depth of 700 g cm-2 (this variation is even more important at sea level). Since densities in small showers are recorded inside 50 m, an apparent exponent alpha which is observed to be around 0.75 can ultimately be in agreement with alpha =0.68 in Nmu approximately=ealpha (and similarly at sea level); consequently heavy compositions or different multiproduction need no longer be invoked to explain this aspect of cosmic-ray data, at least in the energy band 2*104-2*105 GeV.