Simulation of Cosmic Rays in the Earth's Atmosphere and Interpretation of Observed Counts in an X-ray Detector at Balloon Altitude Near Tropical Region

Ritabrata Sarkar; Abhijit Roy; Sandip K. Chakrabarti

doi:10.1016/j.asr.2019.09.046

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arXiv · 2112.08668

Simulation of Cosmic Rays in the Earth's Atmosphere and Interpretation of Observed Counts in an X-ray Detector at Balloon Altitude Near Tropical Region

Ritabrata Sarkar·Abhijit Roy·Sandip K. Chakrabarti

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Abstract

The study of secondary particles produced by the cosmic-ray interaction in the Earth's atmosphere is very crucial as these particles mainly constitute the background counts produced in the high-energy detectors at balloon and satellite altitudes. In the present work, we calculate the abundance of cosmic-ray generated secondary particles at various heights of the atmosphere by means of a Monte Carlo simulation and use this result to understand the background counts in our X-ray observations using balloon-borne instruments operating near the tropical latitude (geomagnetic latitude: $\sim 14.50^{\circ}$ N). For this purpose, we consider a 3D description of the atmospheric and geomagnetic field configurations surrounding the Earth, as well as the electromagnetic and nuclear interaction processes using Geant4 simulation toolkit. Subsequently, we use a realistic mass model description of the detector under consideration, to simulate the counts produced in the detector due to secondary cosmic-ray particles.

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Ritabrata Sarkar, Abhijit Roy, Sandip K. Chakrabarti. 2021-12-16. Simulation of Cosmic Rays in the Earth's Atmosphere and Interpretation of Observed Counts in an X-ray Detector at Balloon Altitude Near Tropical Region. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2019.09.046

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