Atmospheric muon flux at PeV energies

TL;DR

This paper predicts the atmospheric muon flux at PeV energies, emphasizing the potential for IceCube measurements to reduce uncertainties related to charm production and primary cosmic ray composition.

Contribution

It provides high-energy muon flux predictions using three hadronic interaction models, including contributions from charmed hadron decays.

Findings

Predicted muon flux at PeV energies for sea level.

Comparison of flux predictions across three models.

Highlighting the role of charm decays in muon flux.

Abstract

In the near future the energy region above few hundreds of TeV may really be accessible for measurements of the atmospheric muon spectrum by the IceCube array. Therefore one expects that muon flux uncertainties above 50 TeV, related to a poor knowledge of charm production cross sections and insufficiently examined primary spectra and composition, will be diminished. We give predictions for the very high-energy muon spectrum at sea level, obtained with the three hadronic interaction models, taking into account also the muon contribution due to decays of the charmed hadrons.