20km (85.5°)

• Main Authors: Patrick Berghaus, Icecube Collaboration
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.493.7722; http://icecube.wisc.edu/~berghaus/icrc_2009_pb.pdf

The IceCube Detector is located 1.5 km to 2.5 km under the ice at the geographic South Pole. Its instrumented volume will eventually reach 1km3. The trigger rate from downgoing muon bundles is of the order of 1 kHz. The arrows indicate the distance to the surface (slant depth) and the threshold energy (0.1 % survival probability) for muons passing through the ice. Poly-gonato Composition Models: The spectrum of cosmic rays around the knee can be explained through different composition models. The table above shows parametrizations for changing and constant cosmic ray compositions [1]. The ratio of median parent cosmic ray and muon energy is 10 at energies above 1 TeV [2]. A cutoff of the energy per nucleon in the cosmic ray spectrum as resulting from changing composition models will therefore lead to a steepening of the muon spectrum, as shown below. Muon Multiplicity (Simulated): With increasing slant depth, the number of muons per cosmic ray shower decreases. Since the granularity of IceCube is too coarse to resolve individual muons, constraining the measurement to angles near the horizon is the only way to obtain a single muon spectrum.