Related papers: Cosmic ray air showers from sphalerons
We argue that the increase of the ratio baryon/meson due to the presence of strong colour fields and percolation in ultra-high energy hadronic collisions, helps to explain some of the global features of ultra-high energy cosmic ray cascades…
Leptoquarks arise naturally in models attempting the unification of the quark and lepton sectors of the standard model of particle physics. Such particles could be produced in the interaction of high energy quasi-horizontal cosmic neutrinos…
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…
The determination of the primary energy of extensive air showers using the fluorescence detection technique requires an estimation of the energy carried away by particles that do not deposit all their energy in the atmosphere. This…
At high energy, cosmic rays can only be studied by measuring the extensive air showers they produce in the atmosphere of the Earth. Although the main features of air showers can be understood within a simple model of successive…
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…
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…
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…
High-energy cosmic rays interact in the Earth's atmosphere and produce extensive air showers (EASs) which can be measured with large detector arrays at the ground. The interpretation of these measurements relies on models of the EAS…
Surface detector arrays are designed to measure the spectrum and composition of high-energy cosmic rays by detecting the secondary particle flux of the Extensive Air Showers (EAS) induced by the primary cosmic rays. Electromagnetic…
We revisit and extend the analysis supporting a 60 year-old suggestion that cosmic rays air showers resulting from primary particles with energies above 10^{18} eV should be straightforward to detect with radar ranging techniques, where the…
Cosmic rays from outer space enter the atmosphere with energies of up to 10^{11} GeV. The initial particle or a secondary hadron inside the shower may then interact with an air nucleon to produce nonstandard particles. In this article we…
In this paper we review air shower data related to the mass composition of cosmic rays above 10$^{15}$ eV. After explaining the basic relations between air shower observables and the primary mass and energy of cosmic rays, we present…
The Pierre Auger Observatory is the world's largest detector of ultra--high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). It uses an array of fluorescence telescopes and particle detectors at the ground to obtain detailed measurements of the energy…
The composition of ultra-high energy cosmic rays is still poorly known and constitutes a very important topic in the field of high-energy astrophysics. Detection of ultra-high energy cosmic rays is carried out via the extensive air showers…
The realisation that the electroweak anomaly can induce significant baryon number violation at high temperature and that the standard models of particle physics and cosmology contain all the ingredients needed for baryogenesis has led to…
The characteristics of an extensive air shower derive from both the mass of the primary ultra-high-energy cosmic ray that seeds its development and the properties of the hadronic interactions that feed it. With its hybrid detector design,…
The average profiles of cosmic ray shower development as a function of atmospheric depth are measured for the first time with the Fluorescence Detectors at the Pierre Auger Observatory. The profile shapes are well reproduced by the…
After the discovery of the Higgs boson and the rather precise measurement of all electroweak boson's masses the local structure of the electroweak symmetry breaking potential is already quite well established. However, despite being a key…
Studies of the composition of the highest energy cosmic rays with the Pierre Auger Observatory, including examination of hadronic physics effects on the structure of extensive air showers. Submissions to the 31st ICRC, Lodz, Poland (July…