Measurement of high energy muons in extended air showers at KASCADE

In the KASCADE central detector additionally to the already working multiwire proportional chambers (MWPC) a layer of limited streamer tubes has been set up to measure high energy muons (> 2.4 GeV) from extended air showers with a higher efficiency and up to higher muon multiplicities. Experimental tests, the integration of this new detector component into the full KASCADE experiment, the data acquisition and analysis algorithms are presented. As a first common analysis lateral distributions and density spectra of air shower muons have been computed and the results have been compared to measurements of the MWPC. The data have been analyzed on the basis of Monte Carlo simulations of the shower development, in doing so the influence of different models of hadronic interaction on the simulations is investigated. The results concerning the primary spectrum and the elemental composition in the energy range around the knee are compared to the predictions of different astrophysical models. (orig.)