Proton-air collisions in a model of soft interactions at high energies

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Pomeron interactions significantly modify the Gribov-Glauber formula, affecting proton-air cross section estimates at ultra high energies, and presents a model consistent with accelerator and cosmic ray data.

Contribution

It introduces a correction to the Gribov-Glauber formula from Pomeron interactions and applies it to high-energy proton-air collision data.

Findings

Pomeron interactions cause substantial corrections to the Gribov-Glauber formula.

The model accurately describes all available accelerator data including LHC results.

The corrections are larger than experimental errors in cosmic ray measurements.

Abstract

We show that Pomeron interactions generate important corrections to the Gribov-Glauber formula, which is used to extract proton-proton cross sections from proton-air collisions at high energy. We show that these corrections are larger than the errors for proton-air cross sections measured at ultra high energies in cosmic ray experiments. We present a description of these data in our model for soft interactions at high energies, which describes all available accelerator data including that from the LHC.