Some effects of first proton-air interactions on development of giant air showers

✍ Scribed by C. Pryke; L. Voyvodic

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 181 KB
• Volume: 75
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0920-5632
• DOI: 10.1016/s0920-5632(99)00293-5

✦ Synopsis

Air shower simulations have been studied for dependence on features of the initial proton-air collisions at 101°eV. Comparisons are made between results with Sibyll and QGSjet hadronic interaction event generators.

1. I n t r o d u c t i o n

Detailed simulations and understanding of giant air showers are limited by uncertainties in hadronic interaction processes at very high energies.

Here we examine how predictions for longitudinal development of showers induced by 1019eV incident protons depend on two hadronic interaction event generators, Sibyll [1] and QGSjet [2], based respectively on the Dual Parton and the Quark Gluon String models, as incorporated in the CORSIKA shower cascade program[3], [4]. Of particular interest are differences in the distributions of depths of shower maximum, Xmax, for the two models, shower to shower fluctuations, and their correlations with atmospheric depth, elasticity and multiplicity in the initiating proton-air collisions.