On the analysis of cosmic rays

Abstract

The main difficulty in the way of any attempt to analyse the cosmic rays is the fact that for this purpose a complete knowledge of the laws of absorption and of the production of secondaries is required for all the particles occurring in cosmic radiation. Until now such knowledge was neither available theoretically nor experimentally. Several authors have therefore attacked the problem by assuming an exponential absorption law for each component of cosmic radiation or by assuming that the particles have a sharply defined range which is a function of their energy only. For fast electrons and light quanta which certainly constitute a large fraction of cosmic radiation neither of these two assumptions is valid. For this reason we can only attach a qualitative significance to the results obtained by any of the methods mentioned above.