HIGH-ENERGY MUON BUNDLES AND THE SPECTRUM OF PRIMARY COSMIC-RADIATION- RESULTS OF CALCULATIONS - COMPARISON WITH EXPERIMENTAL-DATA - CONCLUSIONS

The results of a simulation of hadronic cascades in the atmosphere and of the propagation of muon bundles of high energy in rock in the rang e of primary-particle energies 10(14)-10(18) eV are given. The concept of a narrow bundle is considered, and the decisive role of Coulomb sc attering of muons in rock in the formation of the structure of a bundl e is demonstrated. It is shown that the fluctuations of the numbers of muons in a bundle at fixed energy of the primary particle are larger than what follows from a Poisson distribution. In the framework of the quark-gluon string model a simulation of the results of experiments c arried out at the KGF, NUSEX and FREJUS detectors showed that current ideas on the energy spectrum and composition of primary cosmic radiati on in the energy region approximately 10(15)-10(16) eV are consistent with the results of these experiments. The possibility of testing mode ls of the interaction of hadrons in the region of large values of the scaling variable x is analyzed.