Experimental Summary: Very High Energy Cosmic Rays and their Interactions

TL;DR

This paper summarizes recent high-precision LHC data and experimental progress in cosmic ray physics, highlighting new insights into cosmic ray spectra, interactions, and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent experimental measurements and their implications for understanding high energy cosmic rays and their interactions.

Findings

High-precision LHC data relevant for cosmic ray physics

Complex structures observed in cosmic ray energy spectrum

Flux suppression at highest energies may be due to source limitations

Abstract

The XVII International Symposium on Very High Energy Cosmic Ray Interactions, held in August of 2012 in Berlin, was the first one in the history of the Symposium, where a plethora of high precision LHC data with relevance for cosmic ray physics was presented. This report aims at giving a brief summary of those measurements and it discusses their relevance for observations of high energy cosmic rays. Enormous progress has been made also in air shower observations and in direct measurements of cosmic rays, exhibiting many more structure in the cosmic ray energy spectrum than just a simple power law with a knee and an ankle. At the highest energy, the flux suppression may not be dominated by the GZK-effect but by the limiting energy of a nearby source or source population. New projects and application of new technologies promise further advances also in the near future. We shall discuss the experimental and theoretical progress in the field and its prospects for coming years.