Influence of shower fluctuations and primary composition on studies of the shower longitudinal development

Abstract

We study the influence of shower fluctuations, and the possible presence of different nuclear species in the primary cosmic ray spectrum, on the experimental determination of both shower energy and the proton air inelastic cross section from studies of the longitudinal development of atmospheric showers in fluorescence experiments. We investigate the potential of track length integral and shower size at maximum as estimators of shower energy. We find that at very high energy (~10^19-10^20 eV) the error of the total energy assignment is dominated by the dependence on the hadronic interaction model, and is of the order of 5%. At lower energy (~10^17-10^18 eV), the uncertainty of the energy determination due to the limited knowledge of the primary cosmic ray composition is more important. The distribution of depth of shower maximum is discussed as a measure of the proton-air cross section. Uncertainties in a possible experimental measurement of this cross section introduced by intrinsic shower fluctuations, the model of hadronic interactions, and the unknown mixture of primary nuclei in the cosmic radiation are numerically evaluated.

12 pages, 11 figures, 4 tables

References in corpus (3)

• Photon yields from nitrogen gas and dry air excited by electrons
• Energy Release in Air Showers
• On the energy determination of extensive air showers through the fluorescence technique

Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Very High Energy Cosmic Rays and Their Interactions
• Longitudinal development of extensive air showers: hybrid code SENECA and full Monte Carlo
• Radiowave Detection of Ultra-High Energy Neutrinos and Cosmic Rays
• On the chemical composition of cosmic rays of highest energy
• The shower size parameter as estimator of extensive air shower energy in fluorescence telescopes
• The Puzzle of Muons in Extensive Air Showers
• Determination of the mass and energy of primary cosmic rays above 100 TeV