Lateral Structure of Extensive Air Showers

Abstract

The problem presented by air showers which have particle densities \ensuremath{\sim}500 per sq meter around the shower axis and which have no multiple peaks with separations of more than a meter has been analyzed previously by Hazen et al. using Fermi's model of meson production. The object of this paper is to show that, contrary to the conclusion of Hazen et al., Fermi's model cannot generate such showers. On the other hand, we show that a modification by Bhabha, to the phenomenological models of meson production, which predicts greater angular concentration of the mesons produced in nucleon-nucleon collisions, can generate the showers of the type referred to above for a suitable choice of the parameter $\ensuremath{\epsilon}$, which in this theory is the ratio of field mass to proper mass.