Cosmic rays that enter the Earth's atmosphere interact with air nuclei, initiating a cascade - an air shower. The secondary particles that reach the ground can be measured with large detector arrays. Understanding the air-shower development is crucial for the interpretation of cosmic-ray observables and strongly depends on our knowledge of high-energy hadron production. During the air-shower...
In order to accurately simulate hadronic cascades through a medium, it is necessary to model hadron-ion collisions with generic hadron species. Pythia has recently added support for hadron-nucleon collisions, along with a simplified toy model for generalizing this to the hadron-ion case. In this talk, I present these developments, including ongoing work to interface it with CORSIKA8, and...
The CORSIKA 8 project is a collaborative effort aiming to develop a versatile C++ framework for the simulation of extensive air showers, intended to eventually succeed the long-standing FORTRAN version. I present an overview of its current capabilities, focusing on aspects concerning the hadronic and muonic shower components. In particular, I demonstrate the “cascade history” feature and its...
In the sub-TeV regime, the most widely used hadronic interaction models disagree significantly in their predictions of particle spectra from cosmic ray induced air showers. We investigate the nature and impact of model uncertainties, focussing on air shower primaries with energies around the transition between high and low energy hadronic interaction models, where the dissimilarities are...
The Pierre Auger Observatory is the world's largest extensive air shower detector. Based on two detection techniques, namely fluorescence telescopes for the observation of the longitudinal development and water Cherenkov detectors for particles at ground, this experiment can be used not only as a cosmic ray observatory, but also to study the basic properties of hadronic interactions leading...
The Pierre Auger Observatory is the world's largest detector for the observation of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) (above the energy of 10^17eV), consisting of a Fluorescence Detector and surface particle detectors known as the Surface Detector (SD). Observations of extensive air showers by the Pierre Auger Observatory can be used to probe hadronic interactions at high energy, in...
