Reconstruction of muon tracks in a buried plastic scintillator muon telescope (BATATA)

The BATATA muon counter was designed as one of the foreseen detector upgrades of the Pierre Auger Observatory with the main goal of quantifying the electromagnetic contamination of the muon signal as a function of the depth for cosmic ray shower energies above 10 PeV. Nevertheless BATATA offers also the possibility of measuring the incoming direction of secondary muons from both GeV and PeV primary cosmic rays. Large efforts have been already done to quantify from simulations the amount of the electromagnetic contamination and the expected muon identification performances. The present work is focused on the evaluation of the detector performances for muon track reconstruction. To this aim and in view of the detector installation in the field, expected to be completed by the first half of current year, we performed a GEANT4 end-to-end simulation of such device and set up a track reconstruction procedure. Typical results concerning achieved acceptance and angular resolution for muons are presented. (C) Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.