Speaker
Description
Understanding the properties of extensive air showers (EAS) is of prime importance for extracting the properties of ultra high-energy cosmic rays from data, such as collected by the Pierre Auger Observatory. Inferring their primary energy and, most importantly, their primary mass relies on detailed comparisons of EAS measurements with corresponding air shower simulations. The largest uncertainties in such simulations are caused by limited knowledge of hadronic interactions at high energies.
To assess the effect of such uncertainties, different hadronic interactions are applied in EAS simulations, each of them being tuned to accelerator data. Pythia8 is a hadronic interaction model that is frequently used in the context of LHC experiments and is well suited to be tuned to accelerator data, but up to now has only rarely been used in EAS simulations. New implemented features were added to the Angantyr model of Pythia8 aiming for a better description of hadron-nucleus interactions.
This contribution focuses on studying $p_T$-integrated identified particle spectra from negatively charged pion-carbon fixed-target collisions at NA61/SHINE and comparing them against the newest version of Pythia8. The validity of the Angantyr model to describe the experimental datasets is investigated using the RIVET interface. A tune of Pythia8 will be discussed in a second time as well as the effects of the fit parameters on muon production in EAS.
