Related papers: Hadronic interaction models and the angular distri…
Earth is constantly struck by radiation coming from the interstellar medium. The very low energy end of the spectrum is shielded by the geomagnetic field but charged particles with energies higher than the geomagnetic cutoff will penetrate…
The temperature of the upper atmosphere affects the height of primary cosmic ray interactions and the production of high-energy cosmic ray muons which can be detected deep underground. The MINOS far detector at Soudan MN, USA, has collected…
Atmospheric muons produced in cosmic-ray air showers are classified as conventional muons from pion and kaon decays and prompt muons from heavy hadron decays. Conventional muons dominate at lower energies, and the prompt component becomes…
The excess of muons observed in ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray air showers relative to simulation predictions, known as the muon puzzle, provides indirect evidence of our incomplete understanding of high-energy hadronic interactions. An…
The Pierre Auger Observatory is the world's largest detector for observation of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) (above the energy of $10^{17}$ eV). It consists of a Fluorescence Detector (FD) and an array of particle detectors known…
The paper aims to explore the asymmetry of the muon content of non-vertical and very high energy Monte Carlo showers due to the influence of Earth's geomagnetic field. Simulations have shown that the geomagnetic field modifies the…
To interpret the mean depth of cosmic ray air shower maximum and its dispersion, we parametrize those two observables as functions of the first two moments of the $\ln A$ distribution. We examine the goodness of this simple method through…
Measurements of electron, muon, and hadron lateral distributions of extensive air showers as recorded by the KASCADE experiment are presented. The data cover the energy range from about 5x10^14 eV up to almost 10^17 eV and extend from the…
Cosmic rays interacting with the Earth's atmosphere generate extensive air showers, which produce Cherenkov, fluorescence and radio emissions. These emissions are key signatures for detection by ground-based, sub-orbital, and…
Muons and neutrinos from cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere originate from decays of mesons in air-showers. Sibyll-2.3c aims to give a precise description of hadronic interactions in the relevant phase space for conventional and…
When high-energy cosmic rays (gamma's, protons, or heavy nuclei) impinge onto the Earth's atmosphere, they interact at high altitude with the air nuclei as targets. By repeated interaction of the secondaries an `extensive air shower' (EAS)…
The results of high energy simulated experiments where a given hadronic particle impacts on a given target are statistically analyzed. The energy range of the projectiles goes from below the LHC scale up to the highest cosmic ray energies.…
In this work we argue that, in the interpretation of the energy dependence of the depth of the shower maximum and of the muon content in high energy cosmic ray showers ($E > 10^{17}$ eV), other variables besides the composition may play an…
Observed since the 1950's, the seasonal effect on underground muons is a well studied phenomenon. The interaction height of incident cosmic rays changes as the temperature of the atmosphere changes, which affects the production height of…
Primary proton-air interactions at ultra-high energies leave a physically interpretable imprint on the correlated fluctuations of the depth of shower maximum and the muon content in extensive air showers. This imprint reflects the…
The energy spectra of hadron cascade showers produced by the cosmic ray muons travelling through water as well as the muon energy spectra underwater at the depth up to 4 km are calculated with two models of muon inelastic scattering on…
It is very well known that the fraction of energy in a hadron collision going into electromagnetic particles (electrons and photons, including those from decays) has a large impact on the number of muons produced in air shower cascades.…
The interaction of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs) with the atoms of the atmosphere can occur at center-of-mass energies that surpass 100 TeV, while present human-made accelerators go up to 13 TeV. Therefore it provides a unique…
The Pierre Auger Observatory has been designed to investigate the most energetic particles known, the ultra high energy cosmic rays. The observatory, covering an area of 3000 km^2, combines two different detection techniques to study the…
Neutrino mass hierarchy can be measured in atmospheric neutrino experiments through the observation of earth matter effects. Magnetized iron calorimeters have been shown to be good in this regard due to their charge identification…