Thinning effects in the simulation of muon production profiles

• Ano de defesa: 2017
• Autor(a) principal: Sousa, Guilherme Tomishiyo Teixeira de
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Chuveiros atmosféricos extensos; Cosmic rays; Extensive air showers; Muon production profile; Perfil de produção de múons; Raios cósmicos; Thinning
• Link de acesso: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/76/76131/tde-22032017-160056/

Extensive air showers’ (EAS) observables sensible to primary cosmic ray mass are a valuable asset in constraining competing astrophysical and particle physics scenarios proposed both to explaining cosmic rays features, such as their all-particle spectra, as well as their origin. These observables, however, need to be interpreted by comparison to EAS simulations, which are a source of great uncertainty. Shower simulations need to rely on a technique called thinning, an algorithm created to reduce computing time and storage requirement. In this work, we evaluate the effects of thinning over the muon production profile of an EAS simulation. For heavier particles it appears that thinned showers generate profiles with a deeper maximum, while results were not conclusive for protons and photon primaries. We investigate the thinning technique by constructing a toy model for shower simulations in which we have full control of the thinning implementation. To that end, we parameterized the energy distribution and particle production multiplicity from proton-air interactions and proton-pion interactions. However, we find that thinning effects over our model were too severe, rendering it impossible to draw further conclusions about its effects on full air showers simulations.