Speaker
Edivaldo Moura Santos
(Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Description
The Pierre Auger Observatory has measured the proton-air cross section for particle production at the CM energy per nucleon of 57 TeV using the extensive air showers produced when ultra-high energy (E > 1018:5 eV) protons smash Nitrogen and Oxygen nuclei at the top of Earth's atmosphere. We describe here the details of this measurement, with special attention to the systematics affecting it. A (model
dependent) determination of the proton-proton inelastic cross section will also be presented together with a comparison with extrapolations from measurements done at LHC energies.
Author
Edivaldo Moura Santos
(Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)