CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Despite the significant experimental effort made in the last decades, theorigin of the ultra high energy cosmic rays is still unknown. The chemicalcomposition of these energetic particles carries key astrophysical informationto identify where they come from. It is well known that the muon content of theshowers generated by the interaction of the cosmic rays with air molecules, isvery sensitive to the primary particle type. Therefore, the measurement of thenumber of muons at ground level is an essential tool to infer the cosmic raymass composition. We introduce a novel method to reconstruct the lateraldistribution of muons with an array of counters buried underground like AMIGA,one of the Pierre Auger Observatory detector systems. The reconstruction buildson a previous method we recently presented by considering the detector timeresolution. With the new method more events can be reconstructed than with theprevious one. In addition the statistical uncertainty of the measured number ofmuons is reduced, allowing for a better primary mass discrimination