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Future detection of Extensive Air Showers (EAS) produced by Ultra High Energy Cosmic Particles (UHECP) by means of space based fluorescence telescopes will open a new window on the universe and allow cosmic ray and neutrino astronomy at a…
The shape of the longitudinal development of the showers generated in the atmosphere by very high energy cosmic ray particles encodes information about the mass composition of the flux, and about the properties of hadronic interactions that…
Improved statistics and mass-composition-sensitive observation are required to clarify the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). Inevitably in the future, the UHECR observatories will have to be expanded due to the small flux;…
The details of Cerenkov light produced by a gamma ray or a cosmic ray incident at the top of the atmosphere is best studied through systematic simulations of the extensive air showers. Recently such studies have become all the more…
The discovery of extensive air showers by Rossi, Schmeiser, Bothe, Kolh\"orster and Auger at the end of the 1930s, facilitated by the coincidence technique of Bothe and Rossi, led to fundamental contributions in the field of cosmic ray…
Ambient concentrations of many pollutants are associated with emissions due to human activity, such as road transport and other combustion sources. In this paper we consider air pollution as a multi--level phenomenon within a Bayesian…
Cloud-aerosol interactions remain a major obstacle to understanding climate and severe weather. Observations suggest that aerosols enhance tropical thunderstorm activity; past research, motivated by the importance of understanding aerosol…
Although the electromagnetic and muonic components of extensive air showers have been studied in great detail, no comprehensive simulation study of the neutron component is available. This is related to the complexity of neutron transport…
Large scale airshower simulations around the GZK cutoff are performed. An extensive analysis of the behaviour of the various subcomponents of the cascade is presented. We focus our investigation both on the study of total and partial…
A detection technique of ultra-high energy cosmic rays, complementary to the fluorescence technique, would be the use of the molecular Bremsstrahlung radiation emitted by low-energy electrons left after the passage of the showers in the…
A drop impacting a solid surface with sufficient velocity will emit many small droplets creating a splash. However, splashing is completely suppressed if the surrounding gas pressure is lowered. The mechanism by which the gas affects…
The absolute value of the air-fluorescence yield is a key parameter for the energy reconstruction of extensive air showers registered by fluorescence telescopes. In previous publications, we reported a detailed Monte Carlo simulation of the…
The analysis of high-energy air shower data allows one to study the proton-air cross section at energies beyond the reach of fixed target and collider experiments. The mean depth of the first interaction point and its fluctuations are a…
We present a new method for the reconstruction of the longitudinal profile of extensive air showers induced by ultra-high energy cosmic rays. In contrast to the typically considered shower size profile, this method employs directly the…
Extended Air Showers produced by cosmic rays impinging on the earth atmosphere irradiate radio frequency radiation through different mechanisms. Upon certain conditions, the emission has a coherent nature, with the consequence that the…
Cherenkov Telescopes (as Magic, Hess and Veritas), while pointing horizontally should reveal also the fluorescence flare tails of nearby down-going air-showers. Such air-showers, born at higher (tens km) altitudes, are growing and extending…
The determination of the mass composition of the highest energy cosmic rays is one of the greatest challenges in cosmic ray experiments. The highest energy cosmic rays are only detected indirectly because of their very low flux. Using the…
The amount of water vapor in the terrestrial atmosphere is highly variable both spatially and temporally. In the tropics it sometimes constitutes 4-5% of the atmosphere. At the same time collisional broadening of spectral lines by water…
We describe the measurement of the depth of maximum, Xmax, of the longitudinal development of air showers induced by cosmic rays. Almost four thousand events above 10^18 eV observed by the fluorescence detector of the Pierre Auger…
Point sources in the atmosphere are surrounded by aureole because of atmospheric scattering. The properties of the time-dependent aureole radiance are calculated by use of a Monte Carlo approach and an iterative method. Since the aureole is…