Azimuthal modulation of cosmic ray flux as an effect of geomagnetic   field in the ARGO-YBJ experiment
  The geomagnetic field causes not only the East-West effect on the primary cosmic rays but also affects the trajectories of the secondary charged particles in the shower, causing their lateral distribution to be stretched along certain directions. Thus both the density of the secondaries near the shower axis and the trigger efficiency of a detector array decrease. The effect depends on the age and on the direction of the showers, thus involving the measured azimuthal distribution. Here the non-uniformity of the azimuthal distribution of the reconstructed events in the ARGO-YBJ experiment is deeply investigated for different zenith angles on the light of this effect. The influence of the geomagnetic field as well as geometric effects are studied by means of a Monte Carlo simulation. 
P. Bernardini, A. D'Amone, H.H. He, G. Mancarella, L. Perrone, A.   Surdo (for the ARGO-YBJ Collaboration)
astro-ph.IM astro-ph.HE