p-air production cross-section and uncorrelated mini-jets processes in pp-scattering

TL;DR

This paper models the p-air production cross-section using a Glauber formalism with mini-jet models embedded in an eikonal approach, successfully reproducing cosmic ray data and analyzing uncertainties from different parton density functions.

Contribution

It introduces a method combining mini-jet models with Glauber formalism to accurately predict p-air cross-sections in cosmic ray interactions.

Findings

Mini-jet models with soft gluon re-summation match cosmic ray data.

Uncertainty estimates are provided based on different parton density functions.

The approach effectively incorporates uncorrelated processes in p-air interactions.

Abstract

For the p-air production cross-section, we use a Glauber formalism which inputs the pp inelastic cross-section from a mini-jet model embedded in a single-channel eikonal expression, which provides the needed contribution of uncorrelated processes. It is then shown that current LO parton density functions for the pp mini-jet cross-sections, with a rise tempered by collinearity induced by soft gluon re-summation, are well suited to reproduce recent cosmic ray results. By comparing results for GRV, MRST72 and MSTW parametrizations, we estimate the uncertainty related to the low-x behavior of these densities.