Speaker
Description
We investigate the observed muon deficit in air-shower simulations when compared to ultrahigh-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) data. We assume that the enhancement of strangeness production in high-energy hadronic collisions reported by the ALICE Collaboration is the keystone to resolve the muon anomaly and study the concomitant $\pi \leftrightarrow K$ swap impact on the shower development. We construct a toy model in terms of the $\pi \leftrightarrow K$ swapping probability $F_s$. We present a parametrization of $F_s$ in terms of the pseudorapidity that can accommodate the UHECR data. Looking to the future, we explore potential strategies for model improvement using the massive amounts of data to be collected at the Forward Physics Facility (FPF). We calculate the FPF sensitivity to $F_s$ and show that FASER$\nu$2 will be able to probe the model phase space.
