Review of Model Predictions for Extensive Air Showers

Abstract

In detailed air shower simulations, the uncertainty in the prediction of shower observable for different primary particles and energies is currently dominated by differences between hadronic interaction models. With the results of the first run of the LHC, the difference between post-LHC model predictions has been reduced at the same level as experimental uncertainties of cosmic ray experiments. At the same time new types of air shower observables, like the muon production depth, have been measured, adding new constraints on hadronic models. Currently no model is able to reproduce consistently all mass composition measurements possible with the Pierre Auger Observatory for instance. We review the current model predictions for various particle production observables and their link with air shower observables and discuss the future possible improvements.

Cosmogenic neutrinos through the GRAND lens unveil the nature of cosmic accelerators

“…The first involves measuring the properties of air showers when cosmic rays interact in the atmosphere, and has been used extensively by Auger and TA. This method relies on the measurement of the depth into the atmosphere at which the maximum fluorescence light is produced, X max , and comparing this to simulations using hadronic models, which still have considerable uncertainties [10,11]. Additionally, the muon flux from the shower can also be used to determine the evolution of the shower through X µ max , but there the hadronic models generally do not describe the data well.…”

Unified atmospheric neutrino passing fractions for large-scale neutrino telescopes

“…We refer the reader to refs. [25,69,91,[98][99][100][101] for discussions on the impact of different hadronic-interaction models on cosmic-ray data.…”