Influence of diffractive interactions on cosmic ray air showers

Abstract

A comparative study of commonly used hadronic collision simulation packages is presented. The characteristics of the products of hadron-nucleus collisions are analyzed from a general perspective, but focusing on their correlation with diffractive processes. One of the purposes of our work is to give quantitative estimations of the impact that different characteristics of the hadronic models have on air shower observables. Several sets of shower simulations using different settings for the parameters controlling the diffractive processes are used to analyze the correlations between diffractivity and shower observables. We find that the relative probability of diffractive processes during the shower development have a non negligible influence over the longitudinal profile as well as the distribution of muons at ground level. The implications on experimental data analysis are discussed.

References in corpus (3)

• Parton-Based Gribov-Regge Theory
• Extensive Air Shower Simulations at the Highest Energies
• Hadronic interactions models beyond collider energies

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Proton-air cross section measurement with the ARGO-YBJ cosmic ray experiment
• Very High Energy Cosmic Rays and Their Interactions
• Testing hadronic interaction packages at cosmic ray energies
• LHC updated hadronic interaction packages analyzed up to cosmic-ray energies
• Confronting models on cosmic ray interactions with particle physics at LHC energies
• Investigating the influence of diffractive interactions on ultra - high energy extensive air showers
• First measurement of the forward rapidity gap distribution in pPb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 8.16 TeV
• Collective behavior in nuclear interactions and shower development