Testing Hadronic Interactions at Ultrahigh Energies with Air Showers Measured by the Pierre Auger Observatory

By A. Aab, P. Abreu, M. Aglietta, E. Ahn, I. Al Samarai, I. Albuquerque, I. Allekotte, J. Allen, P. Allison, A. Almela and 427 more. 2016

205 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ultrahigh energy cosmic ray air showers probe particle physics at energies beyond the reach of accelerators. Here we introduce a new method to test hadronic interaction models without relying on the absolute energy calibration, and apply it to events with primary energy 6-16 EeV (E_CM = 110-170 TeV), whose longitudinal development and lateral distribution were simultaneously measured by the Pierre Auger Observatory. The average hadronic shower is 1.33 +- 0.16 (1.61 +- 0.21) times larger than predicted using the leading LHC-tuned models EPOS-LHC (QGSJetII-04), with a corresponding excess of muons.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0bfe68ee8e683df89e562b9a8eb88a3a761429ff

Citations in the corpus

• Open Questions in Cosmic-Ray Research at Ultrahigh Energies (2019, unknown): “An excess in the muon number of ∼ 30% relative to simulation predictions is not accounted for (Aab et al., 2015b; Aab et al., 2016a).”