Influence of diffractive interactions on cosmic ray air showers.

R. LUNA; A. ZEPEDA; C. A. GARCÍA CANAL; S. J. SCIUTTO

PHYSICAL REVIEW D - PARTICLE AND FILDS

Año: 2004 vol. 71 p. 114034 - 214034

0556-2821

A comparative study of commonly used hadronic collision simulationpackages is presented. The characteristics of the products ofhadron-nucleus collisions are analyzed from a general perspective, butfocusing on their correlation with diffractive processes.One of the purposes of our work is to give quantitativeestimations of the impact that different characteristics of the hadronicmodels have on air shower observables. Several sets of showersimulations using different settings for the parameters controllingthe diffractive processes are used to analyze the correlations betweendiffractivity and shower observables. We find that the relativeprobability of diffractive processes during the shower developmenthave a non negligible influence over the longitudinal profile as wellas the distribution of muons at ground level. The implications onexperimental data analysis are discussed.