Study of the Photonuclear interaction of muons in rock with the MACRO experiment.pdfVIP

1 Study of Photonuclear Interaction of Muons in rock with the MACRO experiment. 9 9 9 1 b e F 5 E. Scapparone for the MACRO Collaboration 1 INFN - Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso S.S.17 km 18+910, 61070, Assergi (AQ), Italy 2 v 6 1 0 2 0 9 9 / x e - p e h : Talk at Xth International Symposium on Very High v Energy Cosmic Ray Interactions i X July 12 - 17, 1998 r To be published in Nucl. Phys. B, Proc. Suppl. a 2 Study of Photonuclear Interaction of Muons in Rock with the MACRO Experiment E. Scapparonea for the MACRO Collaboration∗ aINFN, LNGS S.S.17 km 18+910, 61070, Assergi (AQ), Italy We present first results about the measurement of the charged hadrons production by atmospheric muons in the rock above MACRO. A comparison between the measured rate with the Monte Carlo expectation is presented. 1. Introduction 2. The Detector The inelastic muon-nucleus interaction was A description of MACRO is given elsewhere[1]. studied at accelerators, in the range of large Q2 We remind here that MACRO operates at an av- transfer (Q2 ≥ 1GeV 2) mainly to measure the erage depth of 3800 hg/cm2, where the average nucleon structure functions (deep inelastic scat- residual energy of muons is about 300 GeV. The tering experiments). However, the bulk of in- horizontal area of MACRO is about 1000 m2 and teractions are characterized by low Q2 (Q2 ≤ charged tracks can be reconstructed by means of 0.1GeV 2) and can be described with the exchange a streamer tube system, in