Application of a Thin Organic Scintillator to Study 3α Fragmentation of 12C Nuclei in Interactions with Relativistic Muons and Hadrons

The analysis of amplitude spectra from a thin polystyrene-based scintillation counter on muon-enriched and hadron beams of channel 18 of the U-70 accelerator complex in Protvino has been presented. On the basis of statistics of 150 million events on the Hyperon-M setup, the contribution of the 3α -fragmentation processes are highlighted and the cross sections of these processes on hadron and pion beams with a momentum of 7 GeV/c have been measured. In the future, the obtained result may be of interest for the method of analyzing the age of gas fields based on the concentration of helium in natural gas, the formation of which is possible in the reaction of 3α fragmentation of carbon nuclei in μ^12C interactions induced by high-energy cosmic muons.