Muon production and string percolation effects in cosmic rays at the highest energies

Abstract

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 percolation may occur and play an important role on the description of the induced Extensive Air Showers by enhancing strangeness and baryon production. This leads to a significant increase of the muon content of the cascade in agreement with recent data collected at UHECR experiments. In this work, the effects of string percolation in hadronic interactions are implemented in an EAS code and their impact on several shower observables is evaluated and discussed.

References in corpus (21)

• Measurement of the Depth of Maximum of Extensive Air Showers above 10^18 eV
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• The Astrophysics of Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays
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• The Pierre Auger Observatory II: Studies of Cosmic Ray Composition and Hadronic Interaction models
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• The muonic longitudinal shower profiles at production
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• Percolation approach to phase transitions in high energy nuclear collisions
• Percolation Effects in Very High Energy Cosmic Rays
• Proton-proton cross-sections: the interplay between density and radius

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Hadronic interaction model Sibyll 2.3d and extensive air showers
• Measurement of the fluctuations in the number of muons in extensive air showers with the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Sibyll${}^{★}$
• Universality of the muon component of extensive air showers
• Modeling Strangeness Enhancements to resolve the Muon Excess in Cosmic Ray Extensive Air Shower Data
• Air Shower Simulation and Hadronic Interactions
• Exploring Potential Signatures of QGP in UHECR Ground Profiles
• Lorentz invariance violation as an explanation of muon excess in Auger data
• Probing new physics with high-multiplicity events: UHE neutrinos at air-shower detector arrays
• Particle physics in cosmic rays
• Calculation of rescaling factors and nuclear multiplication of muons in extensive air showers