Constraints from the first LHC data on hadronic event generators for ultra-high energy cosmic-ray physics

By D. d’Enterria, Ralph Engel, Tanguy Pierog, S. Ostapchenko, Klaus Werner. 2011

211 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The determination of the primary energy and mass of ultra-high-energy cosmic-rays (UHECR) generating extensive air-showers in the Earth’s atmosphere, relies on the detailed modeling of hadronic multiparticle production at center-of-mass (c.m.) collision energies up to two orders of magnitude higher than those studied at particle colliders. The first Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data have extended by more than a factor of three the c.m. energies in which we have direct proton–proton measurements available to compare to hadronic models. In this work we compare LHC results on inclusive particle production at energies s = 0.9 , 2.36 , and 7 TeV to predictions of various hadronic Monte Carlo (MC) models used commonly in cosmic-ray (CR) physics ( qgsjet , epos and sibyll ). As a benchmark with a standard collider physics model we also show pythia (and phojet ) predictions with various parameter settings. While reasonable overall agreement is found for some of the MC, none of them reproduces consistently the s evolution of all the observables. We discuss implications of the new LHC data for the description of cosmic-ray interactions at the highest energies.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34ac2b4b544b92b7233ea2379718670bb1f3f840

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Cms Collaboration
2. Tim Huege
3. Ralph Engel
4. M. Unger
5. A. Fedynitch
6. K. Kampert
7. Tanguy Pierog
8. R. Ulrich

Citations in the corpus

• KASCADE-Grande measurements of energy spectra for elemental groups of cosmic rays (2013, result): “[25] compared the first Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data with the predictions of various Monte Carlo event generators, including e.”
• The Muon Puzzle in cosmic-ray induced air showers and its connection to the Large Hadron Collider (2021, background): “The predictive power of the generators is important (d’Enterria et al. 2011), since they are used to extrapolate to cms-energies that are one order of magnitude above the LHC and toward forward rapidities that are not well covered by LHC experiments.”
• Measurement of the inelastic proton-proton cross section at s√=7 TeV (2012, methodology): “The second group includes MC generators based on the same Regge-Gribov phenomenology, but with different implementations of model ingredients [19]: PHOJET, as well as three MC programs commonly used in cosmic-rays physics, such as QGSJET 01 [20], QGSJET II (versions 03 and 04) [21], SIBYLL (version ”