Browsing by Subject "MINOS Far Detector"
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Item Observation of the Cosmic Ray Shadows of the Moon and the Sun Using the MINOS Far Detector(2019-12-13) Fogarty, Samuel JCosmic rays are high energy particles, mostly protons and helium nuclei, that create muons on collision with the atmosphere. The Moon and the Sun block cosmic rays in their travels, so there should be less muons seen in the directions of the Moon and the Sun. These effects are known as the ‘cosmic ray shadows’. The purpose of this research was to find the cosmic ray shadows of the Moon and the Sun using muons observed by the MINOS Far Detector in the Soudan Mine in Soudan, MN. Muons deflect a considerable amount in the atmosphere and rock before they arrive at the detector, so there is a significant smearing effect in the shadows. This smearing effect makes resolving the shadows difficult, so a shadow template was created using Monte-Carlo methods. The template represents what the shadows should actually look like with muon deflection in mind. A background was created (using a Monte-Carlo method) to be the Null hypothesis that represents what the muon data would look like if the Moon and the Sun were not present. The shadow template, background, and signal histograms were compared using a Log-Likelihood Analysis to produce cosmic ray shadows of the Moon and the Sun seen by the Far Detector. The Moon and Sun shadows were produced using 141 million cosmic ray muons observed from October 2003 to September 2016. Confirming the expectation, the Moon shadow was shown to not vary much over time, whereas the Sun shadow varied considerably over time and was much less significant. The statistical nature of cosmic ray muon deflection was explored using binomial statistics and Monte-Carlo methods. It was shown that single and double cosmic ray muon deflection can be simulated using binomial statistics and Monte-Carlo methods.Item Radiative energy loss of muons in the MINOS Far Detector.(2010-07) Bhattarai, PrabhatHigher energy (>100GeV)muons lose their energy preferentially through radiativemethods such as Bremsstrahlung, Pair-production and Photo-production. Because the radiative loss of the energy is a stochastic process, it is hard to select muons which lose their energy through the radiative methods. I will present methods of selecting the highest energy muons in MINOS, looking for radiative energy losses. The MINOS far detector is an underground detector. Since August 2003 the MINOS Far Detector has been collecting the underground muons [1]. The detector receives mostly high energy muons because most of the low energy cosmic muons are absorbed by the rocks in the path. They lose energy in the detector in the form of showers of particles and radiation. To study the cosmic muons reaching theMINOS Detector I have used cosmic ray Monte Carlo simulated data. I applied a number of cuts in the simulated data to select high energy muons. Then I compared the Monte Carlo simulated data with theMINOS far Detector data. I found a high correlation in the data with the correlation coefficient of 0.95 or more depending on the variable I chose to compare. The high correlation suffices to tell that the cuts chosen in theMonte Carlo simulated data are applicable in the case of the Detector data also.