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The Pierre Auger Observatory can be regarded as a large air calorimeter in a cosmic fixed-target experiment with beam energies reaching beyond 1020 eV, or equivalently a center-of-mass energy in proton-nucleus interactions of up to and beyond 400 TeV. As such Auger provides the unique opportunity to take a peek at particle physics well beyond the collision energies that can be obtained at the LHC. One of the key results of Auger is the discovery that these interactions of UHECRs do not behave as expected. Compared to simulations based on models of hadronic interactions, the air showers observed by Auger contain many more muons.
In this seminar I will present the muon measurements by Auger and discuss what they imply about the nature of particle interactions at the highest energies. I will further show how SIBYLL, one of the models of hadronic interactions, can be extended to describe the Auger data and how we can constrain such model extensions at the LHC.
Maik Becker & Serena Maccolini