Related papers: Air showers, hadronic models, and muon production
Air shower universality states that the electromagnetic part of hadron-induced extensive air showers (EAS) can be completely described in terms of the primary energy and shower age. In addition, simulations show that the muon part is well…
Extensive air showers produced by the interaction of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays ($E > 10^{18}$ eV) in the Earth's atmosphere provide a challenging yet unique channel to probe hadronic interactions at the 100 TeV center-of-mass energy…
Extensive air showers (EAS), produced by cosmic rays in the atmosphere, serve as probes of particle interactions, providing access to energies and kinematical regimes beyond the reach of laboratory experiments. Measurements from multiple…
Production of high-energy muons in cosmic-ray air showers, relevant for underground detectors, depends on the properties of the primary cosmic ray as well as the atmospheric temperature through the competition between decay and…
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 mechanism of hadronic interactions at very high energies is still unclear. Available accelerator data constrain weakly the forward rapidity region which determines the development of atmospheric showers. This ignorance is one of the…
We discuss particle production in the high-energy, small-x limit of QCD where the gluon density of hadrons is expected to become nonperturbatively large. Strong modifications of the phase-space distribution of produced particles as compared…
Several methods developed within the Pierre Auger Collaboration for the estimation of the muonic component of the Extensive Air Showers observed in the surface Cherenkov detectors are described. The results derived from the data show a…
The hadronization procedure of the QGSJET-III Monte Carlo (MC) generator of high energy hadronic interactions is discussed. Selected results of the model, regarding production spectra of secondary particles, are presented in comparison to…
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 number of muons in extensive air showers predicted using LHC-tuned hadronic interaction models, such as EPOS-LHC and QGSJetII-04, is smaller than observed in showers recorded by leading cosmic ray experiments. In this paper, we present…
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…
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…
In this paper we analyze the energy evolution of the muon content of air showers between $10^{18.4}$ and $10^{19.6}$ eV to be able to determine the most likely mass composition scenario from future number of muons measurements. The energy…
Extensive air showers (EAS) are a cascade of electromagnetic radiation and ionized particles that produced in the atmosphere through the interaction of a primary cosmic ray with the atom of nucleus in the air producing a huge amount of…
The interpretation of extensive air shower measurements, produced by ultra-high energy cosmic rays, relies on the correct modeling of the hadron-air interactions that occur during the shower development. The majority of hadronic particles…
The investigation of cosmic rays holds significant importance in the realm of particle physics, enabling us to expand our understanding beyond atomic confines. However, the origin and characteristics of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays remain…
Decays of mesons produced in cosmic ray induced air showers in Earth's atmosphere can lead to a flux of light exotic particles which can be detected in underground experiments. We evaluate the energy spectra of the light neutral mesons…
Indications of a discrepancy between simulations and data on the number of muons in cosmic ray (CR) showers exist over a large span of energies. We focus in particular on the excess of multi-muon bundles observed by the DELPHI detector at…
The evolution of the muon content of very high energy air showers (EAS) in the atmosphere is investigated with data of the KASCADE-Grande observatory. For this purpose, the muon attenuation length in the atmosphere is obtained to…