A comprehensive study of shower to shower fluctuations

Abstract

By means of Monte Carlo simulations of extensive air showers (EAS), we have performed a comprehensive study of the shower to shower fluctuations affecting the longitudinal and lateral development of EAS. We split the fluctuations into physical fluctuations and those induced by the thinning procedure customarily applied to simulate showers at EeV energies and above. We study the influence of thinning on the calculation of the shower to shower fluctuations in the simulations. For thinning levels larger than 10^(-5) - 10^(-6), the determination of the shower to shower fluctuations is hampered by the artificial fluctuations induced by the thinning procedure. However, we show that shower to shower fluctuations can still be approximately estimated, and we provide expressions to calculate them. The influence of fluctuations of the depth of first interaction on the determination of shower to shower fluctuations is also addressed.

17 pages, 15 figures

References in corpus (6)

• A Model-Independent Method of Determining Energy Scale and Muon Number in Cosmic Ray Surface Detectors
• Air-shower simulations with and without thinning: artificial fluctuations and their suppression
• The accuracy of signal measurement with the water-Cherenkov detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Testing hadronic interaction packages at cosmic ray energies
• No-thinning simulations of extensive air showers and small scale fluctuations at the ground level
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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Sensitivity of the correlation between the depth of shower maximum and the muon shower size to the cosmic ray composition
• A likelihood method to cross-calibrate air-shower detectors
• On the chemical composition of cosmic rays of highest energy
• Air Shower Simulation and Hadronic Interactions
• Effects of massive photons from the dark sector on the muon content in extensive air showers