Search for seasonal variations of the horizontal muon rate with the HAWC observatory
The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory was designed to study gamma-ray sources in the energy range between a few hundred GeV up to few hundred TeV. It is composed of 300 Water Cherenkov Detectors (WCDs) that cover a surface of approximately 22000 m$^{2}$, at 4100 m a.s.l. In this study, we use the HAWC WCDs as a very large horizontal particle tracker, searching for horizontal muon rate variations by season using 1.5 years of HAWC data. We look for a possible correlation between the effective temperature and the horizontal muon rate. In order to do this, we developed a method to calculate the effective temperature for the horizontal propagation of muons. This is the first time that a search for seasonal variations in the high-altitude horizontal muon rate is reported.
Authors
- H. León Vargas (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5516-4975)
- Cindy Castellón
Institutions
- Centro Medico Nacional Siglo XXI (MX)
Publication Details
- Published
- 2025-09-23
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.22323/1.501.0316
- Primary Topic
- Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- European Commission
- National Research Foundation
- Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología
- National Research Foundation of Korea
- Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla
- Office of National Higher Education Science Research and Innovation Policy Council
- Goddard Space Flight Center
- Dirección General de Asuntos del Personal Académico, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
- Coordinación de la Investigación Científica
- Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo
- Laboratory Directed Research and Development
- Los Alamos National Laboratory