Air Shower Simulation and Hadronic Interactions

TL;DR

This report reviews the current understanding of air shower simulations and hadronic interactions, highlighting successes, discrepancies, and key open questions to improve the modeling of extensive air showers.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the status of air shower simulation and hadronic interactions, emphasizing open issues and comparing experimental results.

Findings

Qualitative agreement in bulk air shower observables

Discrepancies in correlations between longitudinal and lateral measurements

Identification of key problems for future research

Abstract

The aim of this report of the Working Group on Hadronic Interactions and Air Shower Simulation is to give an overview of the status of the field, emphasizing open questions and a comparison of relevant results of the different experiments. It is shown that an approximate overall understanding of extensive air showers and the corresponding hadronic interactions has been reached. The simulations provide a qualitative description of the bulk of the air shower observables. Discrepancies are however found when the correlation between measurements of the longitudinal shower profile are compared to that of the lateral particle distributions at ground. The report concludes with a list of important problems that should be addressed to make progress in understanding hadronic interactions and, hence, improve the reliability of air shower simulations.