The atmospheric charged kaon/pion ratio using seasonal variation methods

Observed since the 1950s, the seasonal effect on underground muons is a well studied phenomenon The interaction height of incident cosmic rays changes as the temperature of the atmosphere changes, which affects the production height of mesons (mostly pions and kaons) The decay of these mesons produces muons that can be detected underground The production of mons is dominated by pion decay, and previous work did not include the effect of kaons In this work, the methods of Barrett and MACRO are extended to include the effect of kaons These efforts give rise to a new method to measure the atmospheric Kin ratio at energies beyond the reach of current fixed target experiments These methods were applied to data from the MINUS far detector A method is developed for making these measurements at other underground detectors, including OPERA, Super-K, IceCube, Baksan and the MINUS near detector. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.