Measuring the vertical muon intensity with the ALTO prototype at Linnaeus University

Abstract: ALTO is a project, currently in the research and development phase, with the goal of constructing a Very High Energy (VHE) gamma-ray observatory in the southern hemisphere. It will detect the particle content reaching the ground from the interactions of either VHE gamma rays or cosmic rays in the atmosphere known as extensive air showers. In this thesis, we use an ALTO prototype built at Linneaus University to estimate the vertical muon intensity in Växjö. The atmospheric muons we detect at ground level come from hadronic showers caused by a cosmic ray entering the atmosphere. Such showers are considered background noise in the context of VHE gamma-ray astronomy, and the presence of muons is an important indicator of the nature of the shower, and thus of the primary particle. The measurement is done by isolating events that produce signals in two small scintillation detectors that are part of the ALTO prototype, and are placed almost directly above each other. This gives us a data set that we assume represents muons travelling along a narrow set of trajectories, and by measuring the rate of such events, we estimate the muon intensity. We estimate the corresponding momentum threshold using two different methods; Monte Carlo simulation and calculation of the mean energy loss. The vertical muon intensity found through this method is about 21% higher than commonly accepted values. We discuss some possible explanations for this discrepancy, and conclude that the most likely explanation is that the isolated data set contains a significant number of “false positives”, i.e., events that do not represent a single muon following the desired trajectory.