"Explosive regime" should dominate collisions of ultra-high energy cosmic rays

Abstract

Since the launch of LHC experiments it has been discovered that the high multiplicity trigger in pp, pA collisions finds events behaving differently from the typical (minimally biased) ones. In central pPb case it has been proven that those possess collective phenomena known as the radial, elliptic and triangular flows, similar to what is known in heavy ion (AA) collisions. In this paper we argue that at the ultra-high energies, E_lab ~ 10^{20} eV, of the observed cosmic rays this regime changes from a small-probability fluctuation to a dominant one. We estimate velocity of the transverse collective expansion for the light-light and heavy-light collisions, and find it comparable to what is observed at LHC for the central PbPb case. We argue that significant changes of spectra of various secondaries associated with this phenomenon should be important for the development of the cosmic ray cascades.