2022-04-15 11:00  Online

Air Shower Physics with IceCube

Dennis Soldin

IceCube is a cubic-kilometer Cherenkov detector in the deep ice at the geographic South Pole. The dominant event yield in the deep ice detector consists of penetrating atmospheric muons with energies above approximately 300GeV, produced in cosmic ray air showers. In addition, the surface array, IceTop, measures the electromagnetic signal and GeV muons of the air shower. Thereby, IceCube and IceTop yield unique opportunities to study air showers with unprecedented statistics in great detail.

We will present recent results of comic ray measurements from IceCube and IceTop. In particular, we will highlight measurements of atmospheric muons produced in air showers and discuss their consistency with predictions from current hadronic interaction models. We will report recent results from an analysis of the density of atmospheric GeV muons with IceTop and present measurements of high-energy muons in the deep antarctic ice. The experimental results will also be compared to other observations which indicate discrepancies between experimental data and model predictions, commonly referred to as the Muon Puzzle. We will discuss the recent experimental results in the context of the Muon Puzzle and outline perspectives for dedicated measurements of muons in IceCube to constrain muon production in current hadronic interaction models in order to discover the origin of the observed discrepancies.

  Presentation Slides