Related papers: High-density QCD and Cosmic Ray Air Showers
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 particle production in the high energy limit of QCD. Due to a large gluon density, the interaction reaches the black disk limit and the projectile is resolved into its partonic structure at the saturation scale. This leads 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 possibility of detection of some features of high energy particle interactions with detectors placed at medium depths underground through studies on high energy muons is investigated. These muons carry information about the early…
To cosmic rays incident near the horizon the Earth's atmosphere represents a beam dump with a slant depth reaching 36000~g~cm$^{-2}$ at $90^\circ$. The prompt decay of a heavy quark produced by very high energy cosmic ray showers will leave…
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 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…
The properties of cosmic rays with energies above 10**6 GeV have to be deduced from the spacetime structure and particle content of the air showers which they initiate. In this review we summarize the phenomenology of these giant air…
High-energy cosmic rays are observed indirectly by detecting the extensive air showers initiated in Earth's atmosphere. The interpretation of these observations relies on accurate models of air shower physics, which is a challenge and an…
We discuss the relation between remnant fragmentation in inelastic high-energy hadronic interactions and muon production in extensive cosmic ray air showers. Using a newly developed tool, a simple and flexible hadronic event generator, we…
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…
Cosmic ray data may allow the determination of the proton-air cross section at ultra-high energy. For example, the distribution of the first interaction point in air showers reflects the particle production cross section. As it is not…
Cosmic rays from outer space enter the atmosphere with energies of up to 10^{11} GeV. The initial particle or a secondary hadron inside the shower may then interact with an air nucleon to produce nonstandard particles. In this article we…
Context: Molecular data of extreme environments, such as Arp 220, but also NGC 253, show evidence for extremely high cosmic ray (CR) rates (10^3-10^4 * Milky Way) and mechanical heating from supernova driven turbulence. Aims: The…
The shape of the longitudinal development of the showers generated in the atmosphere by very high energy cosmic ray particles encodes information about the mass composition of the flux, and about the properties of hadronic interactions that…
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…
We review some of the recent progress in our knowledge about high-energy cosmic rays, with an emphasis on the interpretation of the different observational results. We discuss the effects that are relevant to shape the cosmic ray spectrum…
Eventual signals of split sypersymmetry in cosmic ray physics are analyzed in detail. The study focusses particularly on quasi-stable colorless R-hadrons originating through confinement of long-lived gluinos (with quarks, anti-quarks, and…
The predictions of hadronic interaction models for cosmic-ray induced air showers contain inherent uncertainties due to limitations of available accelerator data and theoretical understanding in the required energy and rapidity regime.…
Extensive air showers initiated by ultra-high energy cosmic rays are sensitive to the details of hadronic interactions models, so we present the main results obtained using the data of the Pierre Auger Observatory. The depth at which the…