AIRES: A system for air shower simulations

Abstract

The AIRES (AIR-shower Extended Simulations) system is a set of programs and subroutines to realistically simulate particle showers produced after the incidence of high energy cosmic rays on the Earth's atmosphere, and to manage all the related output data. The current version includes a series of improvements with respect to previous releases that are explained in detail in this manual and/or the web site aires.fisica.unlp.edu.ar from where the software can be downloaded. Among such improvements, it is worth mentioning: (i) High energy hadronic collisions can be simulated usign the the well-known hadronic models EPOS, QGSJET, or SIBYLL, all of them in their LHC-tuned versions. (ii) Detailed simulation of unstable hadron decays. (iii) The inclusion of a series of pre-compiled, ready to use, external special particle modules, that are characteristic of AIRES since its early versions. Such modules allow, for example, to easily simulate multi-primary particle showers. (iv) An exhaustive revision of the atmospheric profile models, including annual average profiles for geographcal locations corresponding to currently in operation ultra-high energu shower observatories; and also the capability of accepting user-defined custom atmospheric profiles.