Percolation Effects in Very High Energy Cosmic Rays

Abstract

Most QCD models of high energy collisions predict that the inelasticity $K$ is an increasing function of the energy. We argue that, due to percolation of strings, this behaviour will change and, at $\sqrt{s}\simeq 10^4$ GeV, the inelasticity will start to decrease with the energy. This has straightforward consequences in high energy cosmic ray physics: 1) the relative depth of the shower maximum $\bar{X}$ grows faster with energy above the knee; 2) the energy measurements of ground array experiments at GZK energies could be overestimated.

Correction of equation (19) and figures 3 and 4. 4 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Cosmic Rays from the Knee to the Highest Energies
• High multiplicity pp events and J/ψ production at LHC
• String Percolation and the Glasma
• Limiting fragmentation in heavy-ion collisions and percolation of strings
• A simple evolution equation for rapidity distributions in nucleus-nucleus collisions
• Long range correlations, event simulation and parton percolation
• Muon production and string percolation effects in cosmic rays at the highest energies
• Long range forward-backward rapiditiy correlations in proton-proton collisions at LHC
• Elliptic flow at RHIC and LHC in the string percolation approach
• On the chemical composition of cosmic rays of highest energy
• Evolution of particle density in high-energy pp collisions
• Proton-proton cross-sections: the interplay between density and radius
• Percolation and high energy cosmic rays above $10^{17}$ eV
• Energy conservation and scaling violations in particle production
• A model for net-baryon rapidity distribution