Air shower genealogy

Experiments detecting ultra-high energy cosmic rays rely heavily on air shower simulations and models governing the hadronic interactions. These have to cover a vast phase-space (several combinations of projectile species and target nuclei, interaction energies ranging over many orders of magnitude, final-state kinematic distributions), but not all regions of it share the same relevance for air shower observables.

Using the air shower simulation framework CORSIKA 8 and its particle history feature, we investigate the relation between kinematic distributions of pseudorapidity, Feynman-x, and transverse momentum in hadronic interactions and muon distributions from air showers at ground. Additionally, we quantitatively study the energy transfer from the hadronic into the electromagnetic (EM) cascade and the impact of early hadronic interactions on the EM profile and its maximum Xmax.