New physics above 50 TeV: probing its phenomenology through UHECR air-shower simulations

Abstract: Ground based observations appear to indicate that Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) of the highest energies (>10^{18.7} eV) consist of heavy particles -- shower depth and muon production data both pointing towards this conclusion. On the other hand, cosmic-ray arrival directions at energies >10^{18.9} eV exhibit a dipole anisotropy, which disfavors heavy composition, since higher-Z nuclei are strongly deflected by the Galactic magnetic field, suppressing anisotropy. This is the composition problem of UHECR. One solution could be the existence of yet-unknown effects in proton interactions at center-of-mass (CM) energies 50 TeV, which would alter the interaction cross section and the multiplicity of interaction products, mimicking heavy primaries. We study the impact of such changes on cosmic-ray observables using simulations of Extensive Air-Shower (EAS), in order to place constrains on the phenomenology of any new effects for high energy proton interactions that could be probed by \sqrt{s}>50 TeV collisions. We simulate showers of primaries with energies in the range 10^{17} - 10^{20} eV using the CORSIKA code, modified to implement a possible increase in cross-section and multiplicity in hadronic collisions exceeding a CM energy threshold of 50 TeV. We study the composition-sensitive shower observables (shower depth, muons) as a function of cross-section, multiplicity, and primary energy. We find that in order to match the Auger shower depth measurements by means of new hadronic collision effects alone (if extragalactic UHECR are all protons even at the highest energies), the cross-section of proton-air interactions has to be 800 mb at 140 TeV CM energy, accompanied by an increase of a factor of 2-3 in secondary particles. We also study the muon production of the showers in the same scenario.