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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…
One of the uncertainties in interpretation of ultra-high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) data comes from the hadronic interaction models used for air shower Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. The number of muons observed at the ground from…
The Pierre Auger Collaboration has reported an excess in the number of muons of a few tens of percent over expectations computed using extrapolation of hadronic interaction models tuned to accommodate LHC data. Very recently, we proposed an…
A comparative study of simulated air shower longitudinal profiles is presented. An appropriate thinning level for the calculations is first determined empirically. High statistics results are then provided, over a wide energy range,…
The study of hadronic showers, which are produced by cosmic rays penetrating the Earth's atmosphere, is essential for shedding light on the origins and characteristics of high-energy particles originating from space and reaching our planet.…
We present a fast one dimensional hybrid method to efficiently simulate extensive air showers up to the highest observed energies. Based on precalculated pion showers and a bootstrap technique, our method predicts the average shower…
Ultra-high energy cosmic rays generate extensive air showers in Earth's atmosphere. A standard approach to reconstruct the energy of an ultra-high energy cosmic rays is to sample the lateral profile of the particle density on the ground of…
The properties of cosmic rays with energies above 1PeV have to be deduced from the spacetime structure and particle content of the air showers which they initiate. In this review, a summary of the phenomenology of these giant air showers is…
In the sub-TeV regime, the most widely used hadronic interaction models disagree significant lying their predictions for post-first interaction and ground-level particle spectra from cosmic ray induced air showers. These differences…
In this paper parametric formulas are presented to evaluate the flux of atmospheric muons in the range of vertical depth between 1.5 to 5 km of water equivalent (km w.e.) and up to 85^o for the zenith angle. We take into account their…
Understanding hadronic interactions at high energies represents a very important ingredient for modeling high energy cosmic ray air showers. In this paper, we present a new approach to simulate hadronic interactions, including…
A comparative study of commonly used hadronic collision simulation packages is presented. The characteristics of the products of hadron-nucleus collisions are analyzed from a general perspective, but focusing on their correlation with…
In this paper, we will discuss the prospects of deducing the proton-air cross section from fluorescence telescope measurements of extensive air showers. As it is not possible to observe the point of first interaction $X_{\rm 1}$ directly,…
The distribution of depth in which a cosmic ray air shower reaches its maximum number of particles ($X_{max}$) is studied and parametrized. Three functions are studied for proton, carbon, silicon, and iron primary particles with energies…
Cosmic ray muons detected by deep underground and underwater detectors have served as an information source on the high-energy cosmic ray spectrum and hadronic interactions in air showers for almost a century. The theoretical interest in…
We study the role new gauge interactions in extensions of the standard model play in air showers initiated by ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays. Hadron-hadron events remain dominated by quantum chromodynamics, while projectiles and/or targets…
A new family of parameters intended for composition studies in cosmic ray surface array detectors is proposed. The application of this technique to different array layout designs has been analyzed. The parameters make exclusive use of…
We investigate the observed muon deficit in air shower simulations when compared to ultrahigh-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) data. Based upon the observed enhancement of strangeness production in high-energy hadronic collisions reported by the…
We discuss the relation between remnant fragmentation in inelastic high-energy hadronic interactions and muon production in extensive cosmic ray air showers. Using a newly developed tool, a simple and flexible hadronic event generator, we…
Contemporary models of hadronic interactions are reviewed. Basic phenomenological approaches are compared, with an emphasizes on the predicted air shower characteristics. Special attention is payed to the remaining discrepancies between…