A Scintillation Hodoscope for Investigating the Muonic Component of Cosmic Rays at the Tien Shan Mountain Station

A new hodoscopic installation has been built at the Tien Shan Mountain Station to investigate in detail anomalous effects discovered in cosmic rays. It is designed to measure directly the density of muon flux in the core region of extensive air showers (EAS) with a primary energy of 1 to 100 PeV. The new muon hodoscope is based on modern charged particle detectors with a short scintillation flash duration and a high (of the order of several nanoseconds) time resolution of the registration electronics. A specialized program toolchain based on modern machine learning algorithms has been designed for analyzing the acquired information. In addition to investigating the characteristics of the muonic EAS component, the new installation can be used for tasks involving an analysis of the angular distribution of cosmic ray arrival points on the celestial sphere and for selecting showers with reduced hadronic and muonic contents for super-high-energy gamma-ray astronomy.