The electromagnetic interactions of cosmic ray muons in iron

A study of the electromagnetic interactions of muons of energy 7 to 700 GeV in a thick iron absorber has been made with the Durham spectrograph, MARS. Whilst it is never possible in such an interaction experiment to study one of the interaction processes alone, by classifying the experimental data into various ranges of muon energy and energy transfer it is shown that one of the interaction processes can be made to dominate. The measured interaction probabilities agree within the limits of experimental error with those calculated theoretically for energy transfers of 1 to 100 GeV from muons of energy 7 to 700 GeV. (author)