Speaker
Description
We present a novel approach for assessing the muon content of inclined air showers by combining the analysis of radio emissions and the particle footprint. The radiation energy reconstructed by the Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) will serve as an energy estimator, while the muon content will be independently estimated using the water-Cherenkov detector array (WCD) of the Pierre Auger Observatory. We focus our analysis on air showers with primary energy above 4 EeV to ensure full efficiency of the WCD with a grid spacing of 1500 m. From approximately eight years of data collected before the AugerPrime upgrade, we identify a set of 36 high-quality events that are used in the analysis. The estimated muon content in data is consistent with the one for an iron primary as predicted by current-generation hadronic interaction models. Given that a lighter mass composition is expected based on depth of shower maximum measurements, this result can be interpreted as a deficit of muons in simulations. Such a muon deficit was already observed in previous analyses of the Auger Collaboration and is now confirmed for the first time using radio data.
