Precise determination of muon and electromagnetic shower contents from shower universality property

TL;DR

This paper introduces two new methods based on shower universality to accurately estimate muon and electromagnetic contents in extensive air showers, independent of primary particle type, energy, and zenith angle.

Contribution

It presents novel parametrizations for shower components that enable independent estimation of muon and EM signals using universal properties, validated on simulated data.

Findings

Parametrizations are nearly independent of primary particle type, energy, and zenith angle.

Two methods allow accurate estimation of shower components from minimal parameters.

Study based on 28,000 simulated showers with different primaries and interaction models.

Abstract

We consider two new aspects of Extensive Air Shower development universality allowing to make accurate estimation of muon and electromagnetic (EM) shower contents in two independent ways. In the first case, to get muon (or EM) signal in water Cherenkov tanks or in scintillator detectors it is enough to know the vertical depth of shower maximum and the total signal in the ground detector. In the second case, the EM signal can be calculated from the primary particle energy and the zenith angle. In both cases the parametrizations of muon and EM signals are almost independent on primary particle nature, energy and zenith angle. Implications of the considered properties for mass composition and hadronic interaction studies are briefly discussed. The present study is performed on 28000 of proton, oxygen and iron showers, generated with CORSIKA 6.735 for $E^{-1}$ spectrum in the energy range log(E/eV)=18.5-20.0 and uniformly distributed in cos^2(theta) in zenith angle interval theta=0-65 degrees for QGSJET II/Fluka interaction models.