Strong colour fields and cosmic ray showers at ultra-high energies
arXiv:0804.4751
Abstract
We argue that the increase of the ratio baryon/meson due to the presence of strong colour fields and percolation in ultra-high energy hadronic collisions, helps to explain some of the global features of ultra-high energy cosmic ray cascades at E>10^18 eV and, in particular the observed excess in the number of muons with respect to current models of hadronic interactions. A reasonable agreement with the small value and slope of the average depth of shower maximum Xmax vs shower energy -- as seen in data collected at the Pierre Auger Observatory -- can be obtained with a fast increase of the p-Air production cross-section compatible with the Froissart bound.
arXiv comment12 pages, 3 Figs
References in corpus (6)
- Muon content of ultra-high-energy air showers: Yakutsk data versus simulations
- Study of the Cosmic Ray Composition above 0.4 EeV using the Longitudinal Profiles of Showers observed at the Pierre Auger Observatory
- Measurement of the UHECR energy spectrum using data from the Surface Detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory
- Test of hadronic interaction models with data from the Pierre Auger Observatory
- On the measurement of the proton-air cross section using cosmic ray data
- 12th International Conference on Elastic and Diffractive Scattering (Blois Workshop) - Forward Physics and QCD