Simulation of Cosmic Rays in the Earth's Atmosphere and Interpretation of Observed Counts in an X-ray Detector at Balloon Altitude Near Tropical Region

TL;DR

This paper uses Monte Carlo simulations with Geant4 to model secondary cosmic-ray particles at various atmospheric heights and interpret background counts in balloon-borne X-ray detectors near the tropics.

Contribution

It presents a detailed 3D simulation framework combining atmospheric, geomagnetic, and detector models to understand cosmic-ray induced background in balloon experiments.

Findings

Quantified secondary particle abundance at different atmospheric heights.

Simulated detector background counts due to cosmic-ray secondaries.

Provided insights into background sources for tropical balloon observations.

Abstract

The study of secondary particles produced by the cosmic-ray interaction in the Earth's atmosphere is very crucial as these particles mainly constitute the background counts produced in the high-energy detectors at balloon and satellite altitudes. In the present work, we calculate the abundance of cosmic-ray generated secondary particles at various heights of the atmosphere by means of a Monte Carlo simulation and use this result to understand the background counts in our X-ray observations using balloon-borne instruments operating near the tropical latitude (geomagnetic latitude: $\sim 14.50^{\circ}$ N). For this purpose, we consider a 3D description of the atmospheric and geomagnetic field configurations surrounding the Earth, as well as the electromagnetic and nuclear interaction processes using Geant4 simulation toolkit. Subsequently, we use a realistic mass model description of the detector under consideration, to simulate the counts produced in the detector due to secondary cosmic-ray particles.