This website is no longer maintained. Its content may be obsolete. Please visit http://home.cern/ for current CERN information.
The COSMOLEP Experiment
|
---|
The interest of CosmoLep concentrates on two main subjects:
Bundles with multiplicity of up to 100 muons on less than 10 m2 have already been observed by the LEP experiment. In a standard interpretation these events may be used to determine the heavy component at cosmic ray energies around 10^14 - 10^17 eV. The apparent local concentration may also allow the study of the very forward pion production.
Muons with momenta above 100 GeV will be dominantly in the center of the cosmic ray air shower. Coincidences over large distances (several km) will therefore probably not arise from the same air shower. If coincidences would be detected they would be indications for a time structure in the high energetic cosmic radiation or for interactions from much further away than our atmosphere. For these coincidence measurements a parallel read-out of some detectors of the LEP experiments is essential to guarantee a duty-cycle close to 100 % over the measurement time. Coincidences will be searched for off-line by comparing the event times measured at each experiment with a General Position System via satellite. Aleph has already started these measurements with counters located around their experiment.