Emulsion chamber experiments; critical comments and future prospects

Abstract

Emulsion chamber data give valuable information about particle production in the forward region of very high-energy nuclear interactions. Many characteristics of high-energy atmospheric families, observed by emulsion chambers, have not been fully described by simulations employing existing nuclear interaction models. Some of the events and the phenomena observed in emulsion chamber experiments have been considered to be unusual and new, never seen in lower energy accelerator experiments. We re-examine emulsion chamber data critically in order to get unbiased views of these unusual events and phenomena. It is shown that some of the previous interpretations need to be changed. We take up for the discussions scaling violation in C-jets, Centauro events, alignment of showers in high-energy families, hadrons of anomalous absorption in thick lead chambers. We will also discuss the results on the hybrid experiments of emulsion chamber and EAS-array.