Study of the chemical composition of high energy cosmic rays using the muon LDF of EAS between 10^17.25 eV and 10^17.75 eV

A. TAPIA, D. MELO, F. SÁNCHEZ, A. SEDOSKI CROCE, J. M. FIGUEIRA, B. GARCÍA, N. GONZÁLEZ, M. JOSEBACHUILI, D. RAVIGNANI, B. WUNDHEILER, A. ETCHEGOYEN

Simposio; Gravitation, Relativistic Astrophysics and Cosmology; 2014

We explore the feasibility of estimating primary cosmic ray composition at high energies from the study of two parameters of Extensive Air Showers (EAS) at ground and underground level with Monte Carlo simulations using the new EPOS and QGSJETII hadronic models tuned with LHC data. Namely, the slope and density at a given distance of the muon lateral distribution function are analysed in this work. The power to discriminate primary masses is quantified in terms of merit factor for each parameter. The analysis considers three different primary particles (proton, iron and gamma), four different zenith angles (0, 15, 30 and 45 deg) and primary energies of 10^17.25 eV, 10^17.50 eV and 10^17.75 eV.