First International Conference on Computational Intelligence: Modeling, Techniques and Applications (CIMTA) 2013 Estimating Air Shower Fluctuations from the Monte Carlo Simulation Code CORSIKA

AbstractThe study of cosmic ray extensive air showers (EAS) offers a unique way to estimate hadronic interaction cross-section at energiesbeyond the reach of accelerator experiments. Usually the hadron-air cross-section is estimated either by evaluating the absorptionof the hadron initiated EAS flux penetrating the atmosphere or from the distribution of shower maximum. Employing a detailedMonte Carlo (MC) simulation code, the present work critically examined the analysis method usually adopted in obtaining cross-section through attenuation of EAS and estimated the degree of air shower fluctuations affecting the measurements of hadron-aircross sections.c 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the University of Kalyani, Department of Computer Science & Engineering. Keywords: cosmic-ray; simulation; M C code 1. IntroductionThe study of cosmic ray (CR) extensive air showers (EASs) offers a unique opportunity to extract p-air interactioncross-sectionatenergieswellbeyondtheLHCregionatCERN[1]. Generally,EASexperimentsmapthedepthoffirstinteraction of the CR particle on an average basis by exploiting its relationship to some air shower observables. Theabsorption of EAS flux having the same kind of CR particles, the same primary energy and stage of their developmentat different atmospheric depths is linked with the average mean free path of shower induced particle and this propertyis often exploited to estimate proton-air cross-section [2]. While estimating p-air cross section from experimentaldata, the selection of showers of constant energy and stage is usually done by considering simultaneously constantmuon size and shower size ranges of small widths at the observation level whereas to ensure the primaries of theselected showers are of the same type, additionally the magnitude of shower size is chosen suitably. This techniqueis usually called the constant