Related papers: Penetrating component in cosmic rays
We propose a method to extract high-energy hadronic interaction properties from the distributions of two of the main observables of proton extensive air showers: the depth of maximum shower development, $X_\mathrm{max}$, and the number of…
Deep underground experiments present a new avenue to probe the first interactions in extensive air showers or hadronic interactions in the extreme forward phase space. The China Jinping Underground Laboratory, characterized by a vertical…
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…
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 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…
We report a measurement of the cosmic ray helium energy spectrum in the energy interval 0.16 -- 13~PeV, derived by subtracting the proton spectrum from the light component~(proton and helium) spectrum obtained with observations made by the…
The Dual Imaging Cerenkov Experiment (DICE) was designed and operated for making elemental composition measurements of cosmic rays near the knee of the spectrum at several PeV. Here we present the first results using this experiment from…
Our study exploits the Constant Intensity Cut principles applied simultaneously to muonic and electromagnetic detectors of cosmic rays. We use the fact that the ordering of events according to their signal sizes induced in different types…
We present an updated cosmic-ray mass composition analysis in the energy range $10^{16.8}$ to $10^{18.3}$ eV from 334 air showers measured with the LOFAR radio telescope, and selected for minimal bias. In this energy range, the origin of…
We discuss the electromagnetic collisions of high energy protons, pions and kaons with atmospheric nuclei. In particular, we use the equivalent photon approximation to estimate (i) the diffractive collisions where the projectile scatters…
The energy spectrum of cosmic rays in the range 10^15 eV to 6*10^19 eV has been studied using the air Cherenkov light detectors of the Yakutsk array. The total flux of photons produced by relativistic electrons (including positrons as well,…
General physics of very high energy hadronic interactions is discussed. Special attention is payed to the contribution of semihard processes to the interaction dynamics and to the role of parton shadowing and parton density saturation. In…
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…
At Auger energies only model predictions enable us to extract primary cosmic ray features. The simulation of the shower evolution depends sensitively on the first few interactions, necessarily related to the quality of our understanding of…
The events of multiple neutron production under 2000g/cm$^2$ thick rock absorber were studied at the Tien~Shan mountain cosmic ray station, at the altitude of 3340m above the sea level. From comparison of the experimental and Geant4…
Using the large hadron calorimeter of the KASCADE experiment, hadronic cores of extensive air showers have been studied. The hadron lateral and energy distributions have been investigated in order to study the reliability of the shower…
In the last two decades, different advances with extensive air shower (EAS) experiments have allowed to unveil several details about the composition and energy spectrum of galactic cosmic rays from some TeV up to several hundreds of PeV,…
The mass composition of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) is usually inferred from the depth of the shower maximum ($X_{\rm{max}}$) of cosmic-ray showers, which is only ambiguously determined by modern hadronic interaction models. We…
We propose a new experiment to study primary composition around the knee. The Carpet-3 EAS array is the further development of the Carpet-2 EAS array (1700 m a.s.l., Baksan Valley) and it is supposed to be a multi-component and…
We describe a new approach to establishing the mass composition at high energies. Based on measuring both the vertical and inclined shower rates, it has the potential to distinguish heavy nuclei from light nuclei. We apply the method to…