Cosmic rays and particle physics at extremely high energies

Abstract

Cosmic ray extensive air shower observations can give clues about the properties of high-energy particle interactions above 1015eV, in addition to giving information about the primary cosmic ray spectrum at these energies. A brief review of recent high energy accelerator data and its theoretical interpretation is given to explain the necessity for obtaining information from cosmic rays about hadronic interactions beyond machine energies. In particular, it is shown that recent measurements of the energy dependence of total cross-sections and of production cross-sections suggest some sort of threshold behavior in the 1000 GeV region. Studies at higher energies are required to understand the nature of this behavior. The use of air shower data for this purpose is illustrated by comparing shower size us depth measurements with the expectations of various models of strong interactions.