Recent results from the cosmic ray program of the NA61/SHINE experiment

Abstract

NA61/SHINE is a fixed target experiment designed to study hadron-proton, hadron-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus interactions at the CERN Super-Proton-Synchrotron. In this paper we summarize the results from pion-carbon collisions recorded at beam momenta of 158 and 350 GeV/c. Hadron production measurements in this type of interactions is of fundamental importance for the understanding of the muon production in extensive air showers. In particular, production of (anti)baryons and ${\rho }^0$ are mechanisms responsible for increasing the number of muons which reaches the ground. The underestimation of the (anti)baryons or ${\rho }^0$ production rates in current hadronic interaction models could be one of the sources of the excess of muons observed by cosmic ray experiments. The results on the production spectra of ${\pi }^{\pm }$, K${}^{\pm }$, p, $\bar{\text{p}}$, $\Lambda$, $\bar{\Lambda }$, K${}_{\text{S}}^0$, ${\rho }^0$, $\omega$ and K${}^{0\ast }$ are presented, as well as their comparison to predictions of hadronic interaction models currently used in air shower simulations.

8 pages, 9 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Very High Energy Cosmic Ray Interactions (ISVHECRI 2018), Nagoya, Japan

References in corpus (5)

• Testing Hadronic Interactions at Ultrahigh Energies with Air Showers Measured by the Pierre Auger Observatory
• New facts about muon production in Extended Air Shower simulations
• Measurements of ${\pi }^{\pm }$, K${}^{\pm }$, p and $\bar{\text{p}}$ spectra in proton-proton interactions at 20, 31, 40, 80 and 158 GeV/c with the NA61/SHINE spectrometer at the CERN SPS
• Probing the evolution of the EAS muon content in the atmosphere with KASCADE-Grande
• Measurement of Meson Resonance Production in ${\pi }^{-}+$C Interactions at SPS energies

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Muon Puzzle in cosmic-ray induced air showers and its connection to the Large Hadron Collider
• Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays: The Intersection of the Cosmic and Energy Frontiers
• DAEMONFLUX: DAta-drivEn MuOn-calibrated atmospheric Neutrino Flux
• Data-driven hadronic interaction model for atmospheric lepton flux calculations
• What do the highest-energy cosmic-ray data suggest about possible new physics around 50 TeV?