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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 72: Cosmic Ray 3

T 72.6: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 23. März 2022, 17:30–17:45, T-H31

Extrapolation uncertainty of meson-air cross-sections in UHECR air shower simulations — •Maximilian Reininghaus^1,2, Ralf Ulrich¹, Ralph Engel¹, and Tanguy Pierog¹ — ¹Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, Karlsruhe, Deutschland — ²Instituto de Tecnologías en Detección y Astropartículas, Buenos Aires, Argentina

The interaction cross-sections of long-lived hadrons with air nuclei are an important ingredient in the simulation of air showers initiated by high energy cosmic rays. For protons they are tightly constrained by LHC measurements. For other species, in particular pions, which are the most abundant hadrons in air showers, however, precise measurements are available only at low energies. Since there exists significant leeway in a large energy range up to the highest energies, hadronic interation models differ in their extrapolations by up to 30 %.

In this contribution, we study the impact of this extrapolation uncertainty on air shower phenomenology by introducing ad hoc, energy-dependent factors to scale the cross-sections for each species independently. Using a hybrid setup with CORSIKA 8 and CONEX, we simulate UHECR air showers with these modified cross-sections and study the effect on muon content, shower maximum and muon production depth. We find that the longitudinal development is sizeably affected, while the particle content changes only to a minor degree.