On the energy dependence of pionic faction in the hadronic component of cosmic rays

The momentum of the particles of cosmic ray hadronic component has been measured at a 2 km height above the sea level using a device consisting of a wide-gap spark chamber, electromagnet and scintillation counters telescope. Both single and shower particles, whose momenta could be determined, are included in the statistics. Assuming that all the detected negative charge particles are mainly pions, one obtains that the charged pions to charged protons ratio increases from 0.82+-0.15 in the 40-70 GeV energy range up to 2.30+-0.50 in the 130-450 GeV range