Measurement of Pion-Carbon Interactions with NA61/SHINE

For the measurement of ultrahigh-energy cosmic-rays it is crucial to understand the evolution of air showers in the atmosphere. Air showers initiated by cosmic ray particle consist mostly of pions, thus studying the interaction between pions and air molecules is of utmost importance. Fixed target experiments with pions from accelerators like the SPS at CERN are suitable for pion interaction studies. As a proxy for nitrogen, the dominant component of air, carbon is used as a target material. The produced particles and their spectra are measured by the NA61/SHINE detector at the CERN North Area. The detector consists of multiple time projection chambers which allow momentum measurements and particle classification.
In this talk we will present the analysis of a new pion-carbon dataset, including meson spectra and resonance cross sections. Furthermore predictions of hadron interaction models used for air shower simulations are compared with the new data.