Avenues to new-physics searches in cosmic ray air showers
Abstract
Cosmic Rays (CR) impinging on the terrestrial atmosphere provide a viable opportunity to study new physics in hadron-nucleus collisions at energies covering many orders of magnitude, including a regime well beyond LHC energies. The permanent flux of primary CR can be used to estimate event rates for a given type of new physics scenario. As a step to estimate the potential for new-physics searches in CR-induced Extensive Air Showers (EAS), we here determine the total luminosity, including the contribution stemming from the cascade of secondaries in hadron-air interactions using Monte Carlo simulations of the hadronic shower component with CORSIKA~8. We show results obtained for single showers and discuss the interplay with the CR spectrum. Furthermore, we discuss the possibility to study BSM phenomenology in EAS, focusing on so-called large-multiplicity Higgs production as an explicit example and its impact on EAS observables.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2012.14293,
title = {Avenues to new-physics searches in cosmic ray air showers},
author = {Oliver Fischer and Maximilian Reininghaus and Ralf Ulrich},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.14293},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
6 pages, 4 figures; submitted to PoS(ICHEP2020)