ATMOSPHERIC MUON FLUX AT PEV ENERGIES

Abstract

In the near future, the energy region above few hundreds of TeV may really be accessible for measurements of the atmospheric muon spectrum with IceCube array. Therefore, one expects that muon flux uncertainties above 50 TeV, related to a poor knowledge of charm production cross-sections and insufficiently examined primary spectra and composition, will be diminished. We give predictions for the very high-energy muon spectrum at sea level, obtained with the three hadronic interaction models, taking into account also the muon contribution due to decays of the charmed hadrons.