# The atmospheric charged kaon-pion ratio using seasonal variation methods - High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract: Observed since the 1950-s, the seasonal effect on underground muons is a wellstudied phenomenon. The interaction height of incident cosmic rays changes asthe temperature of the atmosphere changes, which affects the production heightof mesons mostly pions and kaons. The decay of these mesons produces muonsthat can be detected underground. The production of muons is dominated by piondecay, and previous work did not include the effect of kaons. In this work, themethods of Barrett and MACRO are extended to include the effect of kaons. Theseefforts give rise to a new method to measure the atmospheric K-$\pi$ ratio atenergies beyond the reach of current fixed target experiments. These methodswere applied to data from the MINOS far detector. A method is developed formaking these measurements at other underground detectors, including OPERA,Super-K, IceCube, Baksan and the MINOS near detector.

Author: E. W. Grashorn, J. K. de Jong, M. C. Goodman, A. Habig, M. L. Marshak, S. Mufson, S. Osprey, P. Schreiner

Source: https://arxiv.org/