Measurement of the proton-air cross-section at $\sqrt{s}=57$ TeV with the Pierre Auger Observatory

Abstract

We report a measurement of the proton-air cross-section for particle production at the center-of-mass energy per nucleon of 57 TeV. This is derived from the distribution of the depths of shower maxima observed with the Pierre Auger Observatory: systematic uncertainties are studied in detail. Analysing the tail of the distribution of the shower maxima, a proton-air cross-section of $[505\pm 22(stat{)}_{-36}^{+28}(sys)]$ mb is found.

9 pages, 4 figures, Accepted at PRL

References in corpus (4)

• Hadronic Multiparticle Production at Ultra-High Energies and Extensive Air Showers
• Hadronic forward scattering: Predictions for the Large Hadron Collider and cosmic rays
• On the measurement of the proton-air cross section using air shower data
• Systematic uncertainties in air shower measurements from high-energy hadronic interaction models

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