Constraints on the energy spectra of charged particles predicted in some model interactions of hadrons with help of the atmospheric muon flux

TL;DR

This paper evaluates hadronic interaction models by comparing their predicted atmospheric muon fluxes at high energies with experimental data, revealing significant overestimations and underestimations in secondary particle production.

Contribution

It provides constraints on the energy spectra of charged particles in hadronic interactions using atmospheric muon flux data, highlighting discrepancies in popular models.

Findings

EPOS models overestimate muon flux by a factor of 1.9 at 10^4 GeV

QGSJET II-03 underestimates muon flux by a factor of 1.8 at the same energy

Discrepancies are consistent with accelerator experiment results at high energies

Abstract

It has been shown that muon flux intensities calculated in terms of the EPOS LHC and EPOS 1.99 models at the energy of 10^4 GeV exceed the data of the classical experiments L3+Cosmic, MACRO and LVD on the spectra of atmospheric muons by a factor of 1.9 and below these data at the same energy by a factor of 1.8 in case of the QGSJET II-03 model. It has been concluded that these tested models overestimate (underestimate in case of QGSJET II-03 model) the production of secondary particles with the highest energies in interactions of hadrons by a factor of ~1.5. The LHCf and TOTEM accelerator experiments show also this type of disagreements with these model predictions at highest energies of secondary particles.