Abstract
The authors have investigated the effect of prompt muons in the high-energy region by analysing the cosmic-ray muon spectra. The ratio of the intensity of prompt muons to pions, which are produced by nucleon-nucleus interactions in the atmosphere, has been obtained as (1-6)*10-4 for muon energies of 10-160 TeV, where the energy amounts to about 2.1*102 TeV/nucleon of incident proton energy on average.