Speaker
Description
The Pierre Auger Observatory is the largest facility in the world to observe ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. Its hybrid detection technique combines the observation of the longitudinal development of the shower in the atmosphere and the measurement of the lateral distribution of particles that arrive at the ground. This has allowed the Auger Collaboration to test hadronic interactions that occur at energies well beyond those accessible by human-made accelerators. The proton-air inelastic cross section for particle interactions was measured and post-LHC hadronic interaction models were probed by means of correlations between different air shower observables. In this contribution, we review the tension between model predictions and data from the muonic component of air showers from the Pierre Auger Observatory, over three decades at the highest energies.
