PoS - Proceedings of Science
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 and B.S. Rao
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
How to cite

Metadata are provided both in "article" format (very similar to INSPIRE) as this helps creating very compact bibliographies which can be beneficial to authors and readers, and in "proceeding" format which is more detailed and complete.

Open Access
Creative Commons LicenseCopyright owned by the author(s) under the term of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.