Related papers: Pythia 8 and Air Shower Simulations: A Tuning Pers…
Air shower simulation programs are essential tools for the analysis of data from cosmic ray experiments and for planning the layout of new detectors. They are used to estimate the energy and mass of the primary particle. Unfortunately the…
The Pierre Auger Observatory is a hybrid detector for cosmic rays with E > 1EeV. From the gathered data we estimated the proton-proton cross-section at sqrt(s) = 55 TeV and tested other features of the hadronic interaction models, which use…
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…
Using the data taken at the Pierre Auger Observatory between December 2004 and December 2012, we have examined the implications of the distributions of depths of atmospheric shower maximum (Xmax), using a hybrid technique, for composition…
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…
Experimental observations of extensive air showers have revealed an excess of the muon content with respect to their theoretical simulations, which we refer to as the muon puzzle. This muon puzzle hampers a precise determination of the…
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…
Current simulations of air showers produced by ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) do not satisfactorily describe recent experimental data, particularly when looking at the muonic shower component relative to the electromagnetic one.…
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…
Production of quarks and gluons in hadron collisions tests Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) over a wide range of energy. Models of QCD are implemented in event generators to simulate hadron collisions and evolution of quarks and gluons into…
The description of high-energy hadronic interactions plays an important role in the (astrophysical) interpretation of air shower data. The parameter space important for the development of air showers (energy and kinematical range) extends…
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 number of muons in an air shower is a strong indicator of the mass of the primary particle and increases with a small power of the cosmic ray mass by the $\beta$-exponent, $N_{\mu} \sim A^{(1-\beta)}$. This behaviour can be explained in…
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…
We investigate the observed muon deficit in air shower simulations when compared to ultrahigh-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) data. Gleaned from the observed enhancement of strangeness production in ALICE data, the associated $\pi \leftrightarrow…
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…
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 hadron production in the simulation of extensive air showers is a long standing problem and the origin of large uncertainties in the reconstruction of the mass of the high energy primary cosmic rays. Hadronic interaction models re-tuned…
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…
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…