Speaker
Description
The Pierre Auger Observatory is the world's largest detector of the ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). It uses a series of fluorescence telescopes and an array of particledetectors at the ground to obtain detailed measurements of the energy spectrum, mass composition and arrival directions of primary cosmic rays (above the energy of 1017 eV) with accuracy not attainable until now.
Observations of extensive air showers performed by the Pierre Auger Observatory can also be used to probe hadronic interactions at high energy, in a kinematic and energy region not accessible by human-made accelerators. Indeed, exploiting Auger data, we reach center-of-mass energies up to √s∼400 TeV, i.e. more than 30 times of those attainable at the LHC, and explore interactions in the very forward region of phase space on targets of atomic mass of 14. In addition, a precise measurement of the muon component of air showers at the ground is more sensitive to the details of the hadronic interactions along many steps of the cascade development, such as the multiplicity of the secondaries and the fraction of electromagnetic component with respect to the total signal. On the contrary, the intrinsic muon fluctuations mostly depend on the first interaction.
In this talk we overview the new Auger studies exploring the connection between the dynamics of the air shower and the multi-particle production, and how this knowledge can be translated into constraints of the high energy hadronic models as well as direct measurements, complementary to, and beyond the reach of, accelerator experiments.
Details
Dariusz Gora for the Pierre Auger Collaboration
| Is this abstract from experiment? | Yes |
|---|---|
| Name of experiment and experimental site | Pierre Auger Observatory |
| Is the speaker for that presentation defined? | Yes |
