Science results from cosmic ray tracks?

• by JeanTate

  As noted in many Discussion posts/Comments/blog posts, quite a few cosmic ray events have been captured in the images we classify. And this is not at all unexpected.

  I'm curious to know if any science team is looking at these events, and if there's any science result that might be expected from an analysis of them; anyone?

  Posted November 8, 2015 1:53 PM

• by alanbarr scientist

  Hi Jean,
  previous experiments - at the LEP accelerator at CERN - have done science with the cosmic rays, and measured their rates, distributions, and energies. The problem with doing this 100m underground is that the ground absorbs many of the cosmic rays, meaning that what you see if you look at them is dominated by the local effects of whether or not there is e.g. a tunnel shaft in the area, which would absorb fewer cosmics. I'm not aware of any ATLAS analyses actually using the cosmic rays for science.

  However ATLAS is doing some other studies which are useful for the cosmic ray laboratories elsewhere. It turns out that one of the difficulties in studying very high energy cosmic rays is that their probability of interacting in the atmosphere is not well known. By studying the probability for glancing collisions between protons at the LHC we can reduce those uncertainties. So indirectly we're helping out with the cosmic ray science.

  Posted January 6, 2016 12:59 PM

• by catlord333

  would this be a cosmic ray specimen AHH0000nh6

  Posted February 25, 2016 3:54 PM