Interpretation of measurements of the number of muons in extensive air shower experiments

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the energy evolution of the muon content of air showers between $10^{18.4}$ and $10^{19.6}$ eV to be able to determine the most likely mass composition scenario from future number of muons measurements. The energy and primary mass evolution of the number of muons is studied based on the Heitler-Matthews model and Monte Carlo simulation of the air shower. A simple model to describe the evolution of the first and second moments of number of muons distributions is proposed and validated. An analysis approach based on the comparison between this model's predictions and data to discriminate among a set of composition scenarios is presented and tested with simulations. It is shown that the composition scenarios can be potentially discriminated under the conditions imposed by the method. The discrimination power of the proposed analysis is stable under systematic changes of the absolute number of muons from model predictions and on the scale of the reconstructed energy.