Radiative energy loss of muons in the MINOS Far Detector.

Abstract

Higher 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.