Air shower simulation for background estimation in muon tomography of volcanoes

S. Béné (1) , Pierre Boivin (2) , Emmanuel Busato (1) , C. Cârloganu (1) , C. Combaret (3) , P. Dupieux (1) , F. Fehr (1) , Pascal Gay (1) , Philippe Labazuy (2) , I. Laktineh (3) , Jean-François Lénat (2) , Didier Miallier (1) , L. Mirabito (3) , V. Niess (1) , A. Portal (2) , B. Vulpescu (1)

1 LPC - Laboratoire de Physique Corpusculaire - Clermont-Ferrand
2 LMV - Laboratoire Magmas et Volcans
3 IPNL - Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon

One of the main sources of background for the radiography of volcanoes using atmospheric muons comes from the accidental coincidences produced in the muon telescopes by charged particles belonging to the air shower generated by the primary cosmic ray. In order to quantify this background effect, Monte Carlo simulations of the showers and of the detector are developed by the TOMUVOL collaboration. As a first step, the atmospheric showers were simulated and investigated using two Monte Carlo packages, CORSIKA and GEANT4.We compared the results provided by the two programs for the muonic component of vertical proton-induced showers at three energies: 1, 10 and 100 TeV. We found that the spatial distribution and energy spectrum of the muons were in good agreement for the two codes.

Domaines: Géophysique [physics.geo-ph]; Géophysique [physics.geo-ph]; Milieux et Changements globaux

S. Béné, Pierre Boivin, Emmanuel Busato, C. Cârloganu, C. Combaret, et al.. Air shower simulation for background estimation in muon tomography of volcanoes. Geoscientific Instrumentation, Methods and Data Systems, 2013, 2, pp.11-15. ⟨10.5194/gi-2-11-2013⟩. ⟨hal-00811452⟩