Remnant Break-up and Muon Production in Cosmic Ray Air Showers

TL;DR

This paper explores how remnant fragmentation in high-energy hadronic interactions influences muon production in cosmic ray air showers, emphasizing the importance of LHCf measurements for understanding this process.

Contribution

It introduces a new hadronic event generator to analyze the forward region of interactions and links LHCf data to muon production in air showers.

Findings

Remnant fragmentation significantly affects muon yields.

LHCf measurements of Feynman-x are crucial for modeling muon production.

The new event generator provides a flexible tool for analysis.

Abstract

We discuss the relation between remnant fragmentation in inelastic high-energy hadronic interactions and muon production in extensive cosmic ray air showers. Using a newly developed tool, a simple and flexible hadronic event generator, we analyze the forward region of hadronic interactions. We show that measurements of the Feynman-x distribution in the beam fragmentation region at LHCf will be key to understanding muon production in air showers quantitatively.