Measurement of Average Muon Shower Density

Cosmic rays are high-energy particles that collide with nuclei in the Earth’s atmosphere to create showers of pions that decay into leptons. We detected cosmic rays through the muon showers they produce using a portable telescope array of plastic scintillators. The scintillators emit photons after being ionized by muons that pass through. A photomultiplier tube transforms the ionization energy into electric pulses that we recorded. Low-energy pulses below a threshold that did not come from muons were excluded. Each telescope has two identical paddles suspended by PVC piping with their surfaces in parallel to focus measurements on a certain region of the sky. To calculate muon flux, a two-dimensional solid angle is associated with this region. We worked to correct the solid angle of each telescope with a simulation. The shower density was estimated from the probability that telescopes contained within a muon shower recorded that shower. Additionally, we developed a microcontroller upgrade that reduced our telescope circuit board’s dead time of 276 ms for each recorded muon to less than 15 ms. Future research and more data is needed to support our results.