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In the sub-TeV regime, the most widely used hadronic interaction models disagree significant lying their predictions for post-first interaction and ground-level particle spectra from cosmic ray induced air showers. These differences…
We present a fast one dimensional hybrid method to efficiently simulate extensive air showers up to the highest observed energies. Based on precalculated pion showers and a bootstrap technique, our method predicts the average shower…
We introduce a simple branching model for the development of hadronic showers in the Earth's atmosphere. Based on this model, we show how the size of the pionic component followed by muons can be estimated. Several aspects of the subsequent…
Understanding hadronic interactions at high energies represents a very important ingredient for modeling high energy cosmic ray air showers. In this paper, we present a new approach to simulate hadronic interactions, including…
Equations for the center of gravity of the shower originated by high energy proton in the atmosphere are written and, within certain simplifications, solved for the case of logarithmically decreasing interaction length of hadrons in the…
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…
It is very well known that the fraction of energy in a hadron collision going into electromagnetic particles (electrons and photons, including those from decays) has a large impact on the number of muons produced in air shower cascades.…
The understanding of the basic properties of the ultra - high energy extensive air showers is strongly dependent on the description of the hadronic interactions in a energy range beyond that probed by the LHC. One of the uncertainties…
We discuss that hadron-induced atmospheric air showers from ultra-high energy cosmic rays are sensitive to QCD interactions at very small momentum fractions x where nonlinear effects should become important. The leading partons from the…
We discuss collective effects like percolation, quark gluon plasma, or string fusion and their effect on the longitudinal development of high energy showers in air. It is shown that iron-air showers could develop more slowly than expected…
We report on a study about some characteristics of muon production during the development of extended air showers initiated by ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. Using simulations with the recent new version of the AIRES air shower simulation…
The bulk of air showers initiated by very high energy cosmic rays exhibits a longitudinal development in depth with a single well-defined shower maximum. However, a small fraction of showers has a profile that differs considerably from this…
High-energy cosmic rays are observed indirectly by detecting the extensive air showers initiated in Earth's atmosphere. The interpretation of experimental data relies on accurate modeling of the air shower development. Simulations based on…
The hardness of the energy spectrum of neutral pions produced in proton-air interactions at ultra-high energies, above $10^{18}$ eV, is constrained by the steepness of the shower-to-shower distribution of the number of muons in…
Studies of the nature of cosmic ray particles at the highest energies are based on the measurement of extensive air showers. Most cosmic ray properties can therefore only be obtained from the interpretation of air shower data and are thus…
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), in particular…
We demonstrate that the shower-to-shower fluctuations of the muon content of extensive air showers correlate with the fluctuations of a variable of the first interaction of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays, which is computed from the fraction…
Whereas air shower simulations are very valuable tools for interpreting cosmic ray data, there is a long standing problem: is seems to be impossible to accommodate at the same time the longitudinal development of air showers and the number…
Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays with energies above ~ 10^18 eV provide an unique window to study hadronic interactions at energies well above those achieved in the largest man-made accelerators. We argue that at those energies string…
We present a new one-dimensional calculation of low and intermediate energy atmospheric muon and neutrino fluxes, using up-to-date data on primary cosmic rays and hadronic interactions. The existing agreement between calculated muon fluxes…