Study of low energy hadronic interaction models based on BESS observed cosmic ray proton and antiproton spectra at medium high altitude

TL;DR

This paper evaluates low energy hadronic interaction models using BESS cosmic ray data, finding FLUKA best for protons but less accurate for antiprotons, while UrQMD and GHEISHA better reproduce antiproton spectra.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of FLUKA, UrQMD, and GHEISHA models against BESS measurements for cosmic ray protons and antiprotons at medium high altitude.

Findings

FLUKA accurately reproduces proton spectra across the observed energy range.

UrQMD performs well at higher energies for protons.

UrQMD and GHEISHA match antiproton spectra within experimental errors.

Abstract

We study low energy hadronic interaction models based on BESS observed cosmic ray proton and antiproton spectra at medium high altitude. Among the three popular low energy interaction models, we find that FLUKA reproduces results of BESS observations on secondary proton spectrum reasonably well over the whole observed energy range, the model UrQMD works well at relatively higher energies whereas spectrum obtained with GHEISHA differs significantly from the measured spectrum. Simulated antiproton spectrum with FLUKA, however, exhibits significant deviations from the BESS observation wheras UrQMD and GHEISHA reproduce the BESS observations within the experimental error.