Volume 301 - 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2017) - Session Cosmic-Ray Indirect. CRI-properties of CRs at high energies (anisotropy, energy, mass)
Effects of atmospheric electric field on muon intensity observed in GRAPES-3 experiment
B. Hariharan,* S.R. Dugad, S.K. Gupta, Y. Hayashi, P. Jagadeesan, A. Jain, S. Kawakami, P.K. Mohanty, P.K. Nayak, B.S. Rao
*corresponding author
Full text: pdf
Pre-published on: August 16, 2017
Published on: August 03, 2018
Abstract
During bad weather conditions, muon flux above 1 GeV observed in GRAPES-3 muon telescope shows large variations. The atmospheric electric field is believed to be responsible for acceleration of cosmic ray muons. A thunderstorm event observed on 30 September 2015 is discussed here. The field of view of large area (560 m$\rm^{2}$) tracking muon telescope at GRAPES-3 allows study of muon intensity variations in 169 directions with $\sim$4$^\circ$ resolution. This event shows large decrease in North-East directions, with a maximum decrease of -0.6% in all directions combined and -4.5% in a single direction. Muons from selected directions were combined and processed with fast Fourier transform (FFT) to remove slow and ultra-fast variations ($\triangle$f = 10-200 cycles per day). The filtered data shows maximum decrease of -1.2% with statistical significance of 9$\sigma$. Monte Carlo simulations were carried out with modified CORSIKA package to incorporate electric field. Simulations show that electric potential $\sim$1 GV is needed to get variation of 1% in GRAPES-3 muon flux.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.301.0481
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