At the Pisa meeting, Gianrossano suggested we plot our events as a
function of geomagnetic latitude. I have been attempting to do that
since the meeting, and I see a very remarkable deficit of upward
through-going events coming from the geomagnetic south pole (1
observed with at least 11.5 expected). Given my number of bins, the
Poisson probability of seeing a fluctuation this bad in any bin is
around a half percent. I have done a number of checks of my work in
the past couple of weeks and I am increasingly persuaded this
measurement is correct. Now I would like to invite others to verify
it.
I will write a very short, informal memo in the next couple of days
about my dataset, methods and results. However, I encourage someone
to do a completely independent analysis without being influenced by my
conclusions about what the MACRO coordinate system means, where the
geomagnetic poles are, or my choice of dataset and binning.
I should emphasize that it is not expected that the geomagnetic
rigidity cutoff is relevant for primary cosmic rays energetic enough
to produce throughgoing muons in MACRO.
Bob