Related papers: Soft Particle Production in Cosmic Ray Showers
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 discovery of the Higgs boson marks a key ingredient to establish the electroweak structure of the Standard Model. Its non-abelian gauge structure gives rise to, yet unobserved, non-perturbative baryon and lepton number violating…
The objective of this work is to report on the influence of muon interactions on the development of air showers initiated by astroparticles. We make a comparative study of the different theoretical approaches to muon bremsstrahlung and…
The Pierre Auger Observatory allows the measurement of both longitudinal profiles and lateral particle distributions of high-energy showers. The former trace the overall shower development, mainly of the electromagnetic component close to…
Ultrahigh energy cosmic ray air showers probe particle physics at energies beyond the reach of accelerators. Here we introduce a new method to test hadronic interaction models without relying on the absolute energy calibration, and apply it…
Muons serve as the best probes of the physics of hadronic interactions in the upper atmosphere because of their simple physics. All the properties of detected muons, such as their energy and angle of incidence, are governed by the…
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…
Astroparticles offer a new path for research in the field of particle physics, allowing investigations at energies above those accesible with accelerators. Ultra-high energy cosmic rays can be studied via the observation of the showers they…
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory provides the opportunity to perform unique measurements of cosmic-ray air showers with its combination of a surface array and a deep detector. Electromagnetic particles and low-energy muons ($\sim$GeV) are…
The first interactions of photon-induced showers are of electromagnetic nature, and the transfer of energy to the hadron/muon channel is reduced with respect to the bulk of hadron-induced showers. This results in a lower number of secondary…
The discrepancy between models and data regarding the muon content in air showers generated by ultra-high energy cosmic rays still needs to be solved. The CONEX simulation framework provides a flexible tool to assess the impact of different…
We demonstrate that a substantial part of the present uncertainties in model predictions for the average maximum depth of cosmic ray-induced extensive air showers is related to very high energy pion-air collisions. Our analysis shows that…
Over the last two decades, various experiments have measured muon densities in extensive air showers over several orders of magnitude in primary energy. While some experiments observed differences in the muon densities between simulated and…
The muon content of extensive air showers is an observable sensitive to the primary composition and to the hadronic interaction properties. The Pierre Auger Observatory uses water-Cherenkov detectors to measure particle densities at the…
Despite the significant experimental effort made in the last decades, the origin of the ultra-high energy cosmic rays is still largely unknown. Key astrophysical information to identify where these energetic particles come from is provided…
Cosmic ray muons have emerged as a non-conventional high-energy radiation probe to monitor dense and large objects. Muons are the most abundant cosmic radiation on Earth, however, their flux at sea level is approximately 10,000 min^-1m^-2…
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…
Data from multiple experiments suggest that the current interaction models used in Monte Carlo simulations do not correctly reproduce the hadronic interactions in air showers produced by ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECR). We have…
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…
The Pierre Auger Observatory, recently completed, has been operational since 2004. As a hybrid experiment, it allows for a wide range of measurements of UHECR-induced extensive air showers (EAS), including measurements of the EAS particle…